The reasons are many. Gay people are bourgeois. They are just like the rest of us, the boy next door, differing only in sexual preference. A rich white man can’t become black. But his son might be gay. Some women are lesbians; some homosexuals are black. Gay liberation is for everyone, rich and poor, black and white, male and female. It’s the all-­American enterprise.

Moreover, gay liberation promises far more than civil rights for blacks and women. The right to same-sex marriage is far more radical than the right to vote or the right to be free from discrimination in employment or housing. The Pride flag represents a new deal for Americans: Government grants what nature denies. We can invent new ways of life in defiance of the most ancient norms. Neither nature nor history can limit us. It’s a stunning view of freedom. It shines more brightly even than the words of the Declaration of Independence, which is why burning the Pride flag today elicits greater opprobrium than burning the stars and stripes.

According to legend, the initial gay rights movement began with a melee at the Stonewall Inn bar in Greenwich Village, when gay patrons fought the police officers who had been sent to round up “deviants.” Due to this episode, what we might call “first-wave queerness” crystallized and became prominent. The Stonewall riots highlighted the plain fact that an active homosexual life diverges from bourgeois values.

First-wave queers participated in the 1960s counterculture. They imagined that straight Americans would join them in fomenting a revolution. In Love’s Body (1966), Norman O. Brown argued that human fulfillment requires overcoming the male-female binary. He preached an “eschatological hermaphroditism” that would inaugurate the perfect freedom of “polymorphous perversity.” Brown’s lyrical book was influential. Its utopian pansexuality led first-wave gay activists to promote the queerest edges and most outrageous behaviors, precisely in order to offend bourgeois sensibilities, and thus hasten the advent of an entirely new social order.

Few leaders of the old queer coalition went as far as Carl Wittman, author of A Gay ­Manifesto (1970). Heterosexuality, Wittman said, “is a ­disease,” and “exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up.” ­Wittman counseled gays to drop the self-­hatred. He pushed boundaries. Sex “with animals may be the beginning of interspecies communication,” and “­sado-masochism, when consensual,” might be “a highly artistic endeavor.” Perversion must be celebrated!

First-wave queers were united in rejecting the “fantasy of the gay liberals,” as Edmund White wrote in his 1980 book States of Desire: Travels in Gay ­America. That “fantasy” held that “all homosexuals are the same as everyone else.” White reveled in the hallucinogens, acid trips, alcohol, cocaine, orgies, and anonymous sex that were common in gay scenes around the country. Sexual compulsiveness, he claimed, was a virtue, not a vice. The violation of youthful beauty was an act of benevolence, not a crime. The young would learn the blessings of uninhibited sex.

Not every writer of that period was utopian. As youthful beauty fades, life in the hedonistic utopia gets hard. The greatest gay novel of the era, ­Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, ends with ­Sutherland, an aging protagonist, apparently committing suicide—exhausted, drugged out, and no longer attracting sex partners.

But Holleran’s grim realism did not set the agenda. Gay literature from the first wave championed the randomness and promiscuity of gay lives. Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots shows gay men targeting “fresh meat” (teenagers) and committing acts of sexual violence. The protagonist, screenwriter Fred Lemish, has sex with more than a dozen men in the novel’s first few pages—all in the pursuit of true love, or so he says.

Raunchy first-wave gays believed that the gay life was superior to humdrum bourgeois life, with its workaday concerns about children, paying the bills, and pleasing a demanding spouse. This sensibility was supported by thinkers who sought to normalize the sexual ­revolution—not only Brown, but also Herbert Marcuse, Michel Foucault, Wilhelm Reich, and others. Human beings thrived, they insisted, when freed of all social constraints or constructs. Moral discipline served the oppressive capitalist order, they argued. Rebellion, especially sexual rebellion, fostered a liberating socialism. In this critical ­theory, promiscuous sodomy became a political act, the more public the better.

First-wave queers flouted gender norms in dress and speech. It was during this period that “butch” became stylish for lesbians, and the gay lisp came into fashion. Raunchy subcultures emerged in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village. The queer scene flourished in gay bars, public parks, and public bathrooms. Orgies were institutions. A gay press was built.

Gays relished their difference, manifest in their embrace of the heretofore derisive word “queer.” And they lived that difference. Alan Bell and ­Martin Weinberg, authors of Homosexualities: A Study of Diversity Among Men and Women (1978), found that 26 percent of gay men had one thousand or more sex partners in a lifetime, while 41 percent had a more modest fifty to five hundred partners. Around three-quarters estimated that the majority of their sexual encounters were with strangers. A 1984 study found that only 4.5 percent of male homosexuals practiced sexual fidelity. First-wave queers saw these statistics as signs of achievement: Gays were in the vanguard of a new way of living!

Gay groups in the 1970s and ’80s included the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, The Daughters of Bilitis, and, after AIDS came on the scene, ACT UP. Popular sentiment was negative, however. During the 1970s, former Miss America Anita Bryant led a successful campaign, “Save our Children,” to allow private discrimination against gays. At about the same time, Canadian authorities raided a gay newspaper that was sympathetic to “boy-love.” Some gays owned the insult. The North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) was founded in 1978 to confront bourgeois morality. The Village People (referring to Greenwich Village) memorialized macho-gay fantasies. Their classic song “Y.M.C.A.” valorized older men’s preying on the young.

Embracing raunch was central to first-wave gay activism. If gays were intransigent and loud, Americans would be forced to accept their bathhouses and orgies and learn to live with them. The mainstream would become much, much queerer and politically radical. As a gay activist writes in Kramer’s Faggots, “we shall make our presence known!, felt!, seen!, respected!, admired!, loved!” Queer Nation, founded in 1990, was the last great raunchy gay group in the first wave. It promoted the slogans “We’re here. We’re queer. Get used to it,” and “Out of the closets and into the Streets.” Queer Nation compared itself to an army, and its manifesto was a model of anti-bourgeois contempt: “Every time we fuck, we win.”

As a strategy, however, raunch contained ­serious ambiguities. On one hand, raunchy gays refused to lie about their lifestyles. They ­contrasted their deviance with a supposedly stultifying mainstream. They saw themselves as subversive shock troops, agents of revolution. On the other hand, they wanted, somehow, respect from a new, queerer American mainstream. Their complaints about discrimination and demands for acceptance sat uneasily with their self-image as bold subversives. Their existence as “the Other” presupposed the continued dominance of the mainstream, and yet they wanted a mainstream that welcomed drag queens, pedophiles, bull dykes, and every other weirdo, not as “normal” people who happened to have gay sex, but as weirdos.

First-wave gay liberation failed. America did not become queerer. Gay activists were compelled to shift their strategy. They began to portray homosexuality as a slight deviation from bourgeois life. Thus was born second-wave gay liberation, which downplayed queerness.

Gilbert Baker, an artist and gay activist, sewed the first Pride flag in the late 1970s at the behest of Harvey Milk, who wanted a symbol of hope and confidence that would encourage militancy among gays. Later gay rights advocates reframed the Pride flag as a symbol of safe, sound, and beneficent diversity. In 1999, Bill ­Clinton designated June as Pride Month to commemorate the Stonewall riots. Clinton’s decree gave official sanction to a new founding myth for the gay movement: The pervasive repression and homophobic intolerance of American society were being justly defeated by the noble struggle of gays for respect, pride, and recognition. Gay liberation became gay rights. It sought inclusion rather than revolution and promised to fulfill mainstream America’s self-image.

The morality tale was created in the early 1990s by gay activists who were facing setbacks. Americans are trained to believe that the arc of history always bends toward social tolerance. But this is not the case. The ways in which minorities present themselves will affect political judgments and legal constructs. As gays came out of the closet after Stonewall and Americans became aware of gay sexual practices, public opinion ­tilted against gay liberation. In 1990, polling indicated that more Americans thought sexual relations between two adults of the same sex were always wrong (73 percent) than had been the case in 1973 (70 percent). “The gay revolution has failed.” So begins Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s 1989 manifesto After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s. A new gay image was needed.

Kirk and Madsen saw gay rights in terms of coalition politics. The gay issue presented a puzzle: how to get Americans to accept the gay coalition, which consisted of gay men and lesbians, as well as exhibitionists, pedophiles, drag queens, cross-dressers, sadomasochists, orgy-lovers, zoophiles, and countless others.

Kirk and Madsen observed that first-wave gay revolutionaries had put forward “screamers, stompers, gender-benders, sadomasochists, and pederasts.” This approach confirmed “America’s worst fears” about the excesses and dangers of gay liberation. Mass pro-gay demonstrations and militant Pride parades turned into “ghastly freak shows” during the 1970s. These realities disgusted American sensibilities.

For the gay coalition to succeed, a new approach was needed. Kirk and Madsen argued for platforming “normal” gays while hiding the weirdos. Gays should be depicted “in the least offensive fashion possible.” With handsome, non-threatening, and normal-looking gays as the face of the coalition, the “homo-hating beliefs and actions” would “look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from them.” Kirk and Madsen advised a canny strategy: “The public should not be shocked and repelled by premature exposure to homosexual behavior itself. Instead, the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.” Being gay had to become boring. Partner benefits, hospital visitation privileges, dignity, and affirmation were to be presented as the essential concerns of gay life.

The second-wave strategy was adopted. The Queer Liberation Front, with its Marxist overtones, was sidelined. Gone was the Pink Triangle, which implied that American society was akin to a Nazi concentration camp. The North American Man-Boy Love Association must “play no part at all,” Kirk and Madsen write, in this new movement. Indeed, one tactic was to accuse opponents of gay rights with unjustly equating the “love that dare not speak its name” with pedophilia.

As the raunchy image of first-wave gay activism was suppressed, the Human Rights Campaign became the leading voice for gay rights. It was portrayed as a natural extension of the nation’s commitment to civil rights. The battle was as American as apple pie.

It worked. Weirdos stayed in the shadows, while normie gays defined the movement. Hollywood gave us Philadelphia in 1993, a movie hewing to Kirk and Madsen’s script. Homophobes in the film are cruel, bigoted liars, perhaps suppressing their own homosexual longings. Tom Hanks, whose character has AIDS, never kisses his lover, played by ­Antonio Banderas. The couple is made to suffer and attract the audience’s sympathy.

In the second-wave script, gays have high tastes, obey the law, and practice monogamy (sort of). They are competent and honest boys next door. In response to this portrayal, which was widely adopted, the number of Americans who thought sexual intimacy between two people of the same sex was always wrong dropped from 73 percent in 1990 to 62 percent in 1993. It sank to below 50 percent in 2008 and hovers around 33 percent today. (It registers in the single digits in Sweden and the Netherlands and below 20 percent in much of Western Europe.)

Second-wave gay rights advocates aimed at stopping all denunciations of gays, lesbians, and allies. To notice any sign of degeneracy within the gay scene made one a homophobe. Gays who pointed out the degeneracy within their own scene were denounced for abetting critics of the movement. In the 2000s and 2010s, the policing of criticism intensified. Accusations of homophobia could end or compromise careers. Opposition to same-sex marriage was stigmatized. Those who violated the new prohibitions, such as Brendan Eich of ­Mozilla, were released from their jobs or, in the case of people like Mark Regnerus, were investigated at the universities where they taught.

The second-wave strategy has been stunningly successful. Few on the right whispered about overturning Obergefell in the years immediately following that closely contested decision. Think tanks that had opposed gay rights and same-sex marriage switched to abortion, religious liberty, or the ill effects of technology. Safer topics. Scholars made prudent decisions to avoid topics that might gain the ire of gay activists. As a result, objective studies of gay distinctives are difficult to find—and respectable scholars hardly ask questions about gay fidelity, mental health, or life expectancy.

But for all its success, second-wave gay activism contained ambiguities. Was it urging propaganda in order to win acceptance? Was the old queer ambition to be out and loud still operating under the surface? Or did second-wave gay activism seek moral reform among gays? Was the presentation of “normie” gays meant to set a standard in the gay community, rather than just shift public opinion? The answer: Yes.

“Straights hate gays not just for what their myths and lies say we are,” Kirk and Madsen write, “but also for what we really are.” Kirk and Madsen advocated better propaganda, but they also called for behavior modification among gays. Reformed gays would be less sexually compulsive, narcissistic, nihilistic, self-indulgent. Their interest in having sex with minors would lessen, and fewer would have sex in public parks, bathhouses, gay bars. Gays would be less obsessed with finding youthful, handsome sex partners, and would cease their cruel shunning of the old and ugly. Gay men with AIDS and other communicable diseases would desist from unprotected sex with other men. Fidelity and enduring relationships would come to be honored among gays. Andrew Sullivan made a contribution to this vision of acceptance combined with reform. His 1995 book Virtually Normal sought to convince straights to embrace same-sex marriage while arguing that bourgeois marriage would tame gays.

But second-wave gay activism never could bring itself to embrace “normal” homosexuality. Kirk and Madsen were of two minds. They saw the public necessity of emphasizing “safe” homosexuality. “Gays must, at this moment, prefer reveille to ­reverie”—which is to say, suppress the impulse toward debauchery for the sake of message discipline. The gay revolution, they promised, would revolutionize public opinion. First gain respect for “monogamous” gays and lesbians, then extend bourgeois approval to those still in the closet—the drag queens, ­cross-dressers, butch dykes, and, perhaps, pedophiles. “In time, as hostilities subside and stereotypes weaken, we see no reason why more and more diversity should not be introduced into the protected image.” After victory for “normal” gays was secured, the weirdos could venture out of the closet.

Kirk and Madsen bet that when same-sex marriage won the day, it would be because Americans had conquered their fear and hatred of the full spectrum of the gay coalition. A people accepting same-sex marriage would not be interested in drawing moral lines of any sort when it came to sex, they thought.

Whether or not Kirk and Madsen correctly predicted the long-term consequences of the gay rights victories of recent decades, the second wave of gay liberation is giving way to a third wave, one that aims to license the full panoply of sexual deviance. Cross-dressers have come out of the closet. Academics have tried to mainstream minor-attracted persons. Queer pedagogy has flooded into elementary school, and drag queens read to children in public libraries.

Players from the old and confrontational gay rights revolution had been sidelined while public opinion was being transformed. Now, in the third wave, they believe the coast is clear. They are ­going public and celebrating sexual weirdness. In this way, they echo the first-wave queers and their affirmation of the most extreme forms of ­deviance. But the third wave also wants to follow the playbook that led to Obergefell. It emphasizes the liberal language of consent, affirmation, and human dignity, not the old vision of anti-bourgeois revolution. “Minor-attracted persons” are trying to win acceptance for an orientation, not a psychological disorder—a rhetoric that copies exactly the second-wave playbook. Transgender youth are innocent and vulnerable, and they must be supported and affirmed so that America can fulfill its vocation as an inclusive nation. Drag queens are just being their authentic selves (as Darel Paul has shown in these pages).

Weirdos act like it’s 1975, but they talk the language of 2015. Drag queens, pedophiles, and gender-benders demand respect, dignity, and affirmation. Transing kids and promoting gay sex to youngsters are now included in comprehensive sex education under the banner of “best practices” for promoting the mental health of children and encouraging tolerance.

But third-wave gay activism has its ambiguities as well. It embraces the second wave’s achievements, especially the successful capture of the language and prestige of civil rights. But because the third wave pushes acceptance of “out and proud” deviance, it inevitably becomes revolutionary, as the first wave recognized. And revolution means an assault on mainstream American sensibilities, which, perhaps, prepares the ground for a reaction or “backlash.”

This ambiguity is evident in the T that has been added to LGB. Transpeople are gender benders whose appearances and behaviors do not fit ­society’s expectations for their biological sex. Third-wave activism insists that they are different, yes, but “normal.” They need to “transition,” but otherwise are just like everybody else. The imperative is acceptance and inclusion.

But unlike gays at a sex party, transpeople are transgressive in public. Everyone must pretend that the man playing women’s volleyball is a woman—or commit a civil rights violation. Misgendering is likewise a civil rights violation in several states. Trans propaganda of normality is coupled with a fervent need to denounce and cancel transphobes. Birth certificates and government IDs must be changed. Euphemisms such as “child-bearing persons” must be employed.

The trans movement is a freak show with totalitarian impulses. The same-sex movement got ­many Americans, including a majority of the Supreme Court justices, to pretend to believe that marriage only incidentally concerned the having and raising of children. The trans movement demands that people forget that there are only two sexes—an even more fundamental human truth. And that kind of forgetting entails a revolution more far-reaching than anything first-wave queers imagined.

Third-wave gay activism even threatens second-wave achievements. Americans were sold same-sex marriage with abstract appeals to lifestyle and dignity. The appeal for acceptance becomes more difficult when Americans learn about “married” gay men who adopt young boys or see lesbians holding hands or gay men necking in public places. Just as ultrasounds brought home to many Americans the reality of unborn children, Instagram posts of manly gay people celebrating the fruits of surrogacy bring the reality of gay marriage home. Kirk and Madsen wanted to keep the reality of gay sex and same-sex marriage hidden, but eventually people notice—and judge. Few television shows depict gay sex, despite the fact that polls say that the majority of Americans support the right of gays to be depicted on television. The “conservative” actions of entertainment producers speak more loudly than polls. It’s not clear that the “wins” of recent decades are as deep and secure as Kirk and Madsen had hoped.

Stretching the category of respectability to cover the raunchy and weird hollows out the whole concept. In 2015, when the arc of history seemed to bend toward limitless inclusion, proceeding from same-sex marriage to the trans cause looked like a winning approach. The Human Rights Campaign went all in. Corporations sold tucking underwear for children. Trans propaganda was everywhere. Today, the same-sex marriage brand is tarnished by its connection with the transing of kids, the platforming of drag queens, and the grooming of children with comprehensive sex education. Pride parades seem passé, and some sponsors have backed away from them.

To be sure, supermajorities continue to support same-sex marriage. But the trends are not favorable to third-wave gay activism. According to Gallup, from 2022 to 2024, Republican support for same-sex marriage dipped from 55 percent to 46 percent, while Democratic support fell from 87 percent to 83 percent. An AEI poll shows an astounding 11-point drop in support for same-sex marriage among Gen Z between 2021 and 2014 (from 80 percent to 69 percent). Ipsos, a French marketing firm, found that in the past three years, support for same-sex marriage had dropped in eighteen of the twenty-six countries surveyed. In 2014, near the height of the “after the ball” strategy, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. The number increased to 75 percent in 2019. Future polling will, I predict, show declines in support.

The question we need to ask is how to accelerate these trends. During the same-sex marriage debate, it was taken as self-evident that the first side that talks about sodomy loses. The left knew it had to hide reality; the right feared looking intolerant. As a result, neither side brought up anal sex. Both sides stuck to abstract notions of rights, dignity, and the proper definition of marriage.

The public’s uneasiness with the realities ­unleashed by gay liberation suggests a new strategy, or a return to an older one. As the third wave becomes more frank and open about what it seeks to make mainstream, social conservatives must become more frank and open about what they seek to promote and censure.  Trimming off the ­excesses of the gay revolution is a containment strategy that does not work. Yesterday’s sexual revolution is institutionalized and awaits its next revolutionary moment. More boldness is needed.

The first step involves exposing the second-wave strategy. That strategy foregrounded the ­virtually normal, and it did so knowing that it would thereby empower the abnormal. The plan was to queer the mainstream. The public needs to understand the connection between same-sex marriage and trans ideology.

Research into and reporting on the reality of gay life was suppressed under second-wave gay activism. We need to reverse this. Funding must be provided for scholarly studies of gay adoption, gay life expectancy, and other features of gay life. Stories should be written about the gay scene in various cities. Gay activists who adopted the second-wave strategy worked hard to shut down this work in the past, because they knew that scholarly research and journalistic exposés would hurt their cause. The right complied, for a variety of reasons.

Such compliance must end. We need to know what proportion of male-male marriages remain monogamous, in comparison with male-female marriages. It is easy to find up-to-date data on the number of sexual partners for straight men and women, but difficult to find the same data for gay men. The CDC should collect those numbers, too. Studies must be done on the mental health and life outcomes of children raised in same-sex households.

Edmund White’s States of Desire surveyed the gay scene in seven American cities. Gays celebrated their deviance in 1980 through gay journalism and literature. Opponents of the gay revolution took the same evidence and systematically presented it to the public, to good effect. Both the deviants and their opponents were silenced by second-wave gay activism.

The frankness and ambition of third-wave activism constitute an opportunity. Well-reported stories can expose surrogacy as a practice that allows doctors to become rich by peddling children to gay couples. We need profiles of discarded surrogates and accounts of the experience of children who lack opposite-sex parents, to say nothing of children adopted and then sexually abused.

The second-wave dignity revolution was always an unstable gambit, meant to hide reality and suppress judgment. Now the unpleasant reality of raunch is coming into the open, not least because of the misjudgment about the trans movement. This reality is creating a vibe shift among many Americans. The arc of history need not bend toward acceptance of sexual deviance. Today, it is possible to imagine the rollback of the gay rights revolution.

The post The Rise and Fall of Gay Activism appeared first on First Things.

In 2018, two Polish men went to Germany to get “married.” Upon their return to Poland they asked the local civil registrar to record their “marriage” in the civil registry. The registrar demurred, citing Polish law and the constitution. The two men sued, taking their case to Strasbourg.

In Jakub Cupriak-Trojan and Mateusz Trojan v. Wojewoda Mazowiecki, the ECJ concedes that marriage is still a matter “within the competence” of member states, not of the Union. So how did the ECJ reach its decision ordering Poland to comply? Citing the four sacred “freedoms” that have animated the European project since the 1950s, the ECJ invoked the “free movement of persons” to order Poland to register the marriage. Poland does not have to allow same-sex marriage, but not recognizing other states’ same-sex marriages would impair the “free movement of persons” within the Union, the court argued. A provision originally designed to facilitate economic activity—free movement of goods, services, capital, and persons (as in, labor)—has now become a universal ticket to lifestyle “rights” even against national constitutions, laws, and cultures.

What’s even more interesting is the December 9 statement of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE). It’s long on law and politics, short on morality.

While “fully respecting the role of the EU judiciary” and noting “with concern” how the ruling may affect national jurisdiction (“competences”), the bishops emphasize the need for “a prudent and cautious approach to family law cases that have cross-border implications” and suggest the ruling “appears to push jurisprudence beyond EU competences” (emphasis added). In other words: We are registering a mild protest—please don’t get mad at us!

The EU bishops opine that the “ruling may foster pressure to amend national family law, creating a convergence of matrimonial-law effects despite the EU having no mandate to harmonise family law and may also increase legal uncertainty.” It might even establish a precedent for other lifestyle issues, such as surrogacy.

The bishops close their remarks with what they seem to think could be the most damning outcome of the ruling: It might stoke “anti-European sentiments in Member States” that are “instrumentalised” to polarize society. For the bishops, that is clearly Armageddon. 

The tone of the statement hardly reflects that the issue at stake is marriage, which Catholic social thought has consistently held is the foundational rock and cell of society. When marriage is threatened, the family, and society at large, falls apart.

I understand why the bishops tiptoe around the issue: The Church has been a cheerleader of the EU project for decades; to change course would be to admit that it has failed. But the European project of Ursula von der Leyen, Frans Timmermans, and Javier Solana is hardly the same project of Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, and Jean Monnet, Catholic advocates of postwar European integration who frequently attended Mass. Perhaps the bishops should have woken up and smelled the coffee when the EU founding documents were being written and, despite Pope St. John Paul II’s appeal, Brussels included no mention of Christianity as a foundational element of European heritage and culture.

The EU’s Catholic bishops lack the spine to throw down the gauntlet in protection of marriage and the family. Which means their supposition—that “freedom to move” will be a cudgel to export pan-European lifestyle libertinism—may expand into other areas.

Consider the “My Voice, My Choice” movement. On November 5, a European Parliament committee approved a resolution calling on member states to “align [their abortion laws] with international human rights standards,” as in, legalize abortion. The resolution also calls for establishing an EU-wide money pool to fund pregnant women in benighted countries to travel elsewhere in the Union to procure abortions. The “free movement of persons” horseman rides again.

The bishops have not commented on the resolution; they would be wise to do so, and fast. A citizens’ initiative is underway to force the European Commission (the real power body in Brussels) to address the issue, including the claim that a right to abortion should be enumerated among the “fundamental rights” of EU citizens. The Commission may have to address this by the end of March 2026. This isn’t going to go away.

A number of EU members have family protective provisions in their national constitutions. Some have even upped the stakes: Both Hungary and Slovakia have amended their constitutions to stipulate EU rules cannot trump national laws on issues of “national identity” such as family. The European Commission is already pursuing “infringement procedures” against Slovakia.

The Church needs to decide: Does it stand with today’s anawim—families that want to live in societies that recognize that marriage and family are reflections of the divine covenant between Christ and his Church—or with the “European project’s” powerbrokers who intend to foist a package of ersatz lifestyle “rights” upon the continent? The bishops’ statement, cautious to the point of near-whisper, does not yet demonstrate the clarity or confidence that this moment demands. Europe’s future—and the integrity of its Christian witness—requires something more than procedural worry. It requires the courage to say plainly what is at stake.

The post Same-Sex Marriage and the European Bishops appeared first on First Things.

The topic of Olsen’s essay is the Heritage Foundation’s hiring of Boise State professor Scott Yenor to direct its Center for American Studies. Yenor is an old-school conservative who is not afraid to push buttons and challenge all sorts of post–sexual revolution priors. The subtext is the establishment right’s ongoing conniption about Heritage’s MAGA-era openness to populist, nationalist, and traditionalist ideas that are supposedly anathema to the respectable, fusionist conservatism of most Beltway think tanks.

Olsen frames his essay as an indictment of Yenor cum chivalric defense of Republican women. The first problem is, he never actually indicts or defends anyone. Every sentence seems biased, every attack feline and indirect. Olsen calls Yenor’s views “controversial,” and says his recent hiring “poses serious questions.” He obliquely wonders whether “many social conservatives” might disagree with Yenor. But Olsen himself never gets around to refuting Yenor. In fact, the entire piece reads as though he is tattling on Yenor, rather than debating him. 

He throws some of this shade from behind conservative women’s skirts, insinuating that they—everyone from Megyn Kelly to Phyllis Schlafly to women on Heritage’s board—would probably-definitely-for-sure be outraged about Yenor’s scholarship. This segment of the piece reads like a cafeteria whisper campaign.

When Olsen engages the substance of Yenor’s policy work, the results are not compelling. Olsen scolds Yenor for believing that businesses should be allowed to pay higher “breadwinner” wages to male heads of households. But shouldn’t they? As economist Lyman Stone noted on X, employment benefits packages like health insurance and child care do give higher compensation to people with dependents.

Olsen then takes Yenor to task for believing that some “legal changes wrought since first-wave feminism” have “weakened” traditional social incentives nudging young people toward marriage. Does Olsen—does anyone—doubt this?       

As it happens, I disagree with Yenor that repealing the Civil Rights Act’s inclusion of women as a protected class would have the social benefits he envisions. But contra Olsen, this is absolutely a debate serious conservatives should be able to have. Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement—one of the best-regarded conservative books of this century—is a deep dive into the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act’s Big Karen enforcement regime.

Olsen tries to drive a wedge between Yenor and “today’s Republican Party” by laundering his disagreements with the Heritage scholar through powerful Republican women: “The GOP has spotlighted high-ranking women—including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Senator Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama—in its bid to attract more female voters.”

Not only does Olsen use these women as moral ventriloquist dolls, like Uriah Heep’s mother. He’s denigrating some of the most accomplished working moms in America as pretty-in-pink tokens for the real Republicans—men?—behind the scenes “spotlighting” them to win ladies’ votes.

There is much more to say about the piece itself: its piling-on timing; Olsen’s shopping it to a liberal outlet; his haughty (though as always, humbly indirect) demand that Heritage cancel Yenor; his unironic, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids use of the word “girlbosses.” But it’s the essay’s context that really matters.

Olsen is right that the Heritage Foundation should stand in the conservative mainstream. But the conservative mainstream has moved. Fifteen years ago, unapologetic border security, non-interventionism, and worker-and-family-first economic policy were “outside the American and conservative mainstreams.” Then they got Trump elected. 

As Olsen the elections analyst knows, the GOP that operated within the Conservatism, Inc. guardrails he’s trying to enforce lost presidential popular votes all but once between 1992 and 2012. And the fleeting congressional majorities Democrat overreach handed Republicans in that era presided over record debt, cratering birth rates, pointless wars, and the financial crisis. 

How many existential national crises must the old fusionist establishment fail to address before conservatives have Henry Olsen’s permission to start calling different plays? Of course, the conservative movement needs to be on guard against extremism and intellectual poison. But establishment hubris is one of those poisons now. The only way to find conservatism’s best ideas is to debate them. Summarily excommunicating dissenters without serious debate is not leadership. It’s superstition. 

If the GOP tent is big enough for pro-choicers who are fine with killing the unborn, free-traders on board with killing our industrial base, and war-hawks who support killing another generation of young men half a world away, surely we can find room for people who think it’s okay for Scrooge to give Bob Cratchit a raise so Mrs. Cratchit can stay home with the kids.

Olsen’s essay embodies the Washington Republican establishment’s continued, willful, pathological blindness to its own discrediting. No one—and I mean this very sincerely—no one trusts them anymore. Conservative think-tankers should spend less time curating burn books and more time solving the problems the GOP’s fusionist elite has caused, welcomed, or ignored for a generation.

Agree with him or not, that’s what Scott Yenor is doing. It’s what the Heritage Foundation is doing. It’s what President Trump and Vice President Vance and their teams are trying to do. Old fusionist Boomer-Cons could contribute a lot to this work.

But first they need to stop trying to make Paul Ryanism happen. It’s not going to happen.

The post Who’s Afraid of Scott Yenor? appeared first on First Things.

Had the ostensibly secular publication been caught up in a wave of piety? Were its writers moved by the image of the Holy Spirit, who at Pentecost brought to completion the work of Easter, now placing his seal on the heart of a child of God reborn in baptism? Did the thought of another witness of Christ equipped to build up the Church on earth energize and inspire them? Did they, like St. Thomas Aquinas, thrill at the image of more soldiers of Christ equipped for spiritual combat?

People’s motives, alas, may have been elsewhere. It seems the confirmand—Gio Benitez—is openly gay, civilly married, and was confirmed with his “husband” as his sponsor. The phrase “exactly as I am” stood out in the Instagram post announcing the event.

The confirmation raises plenty of hard-to-answer questions and seems to have been intended to do so; the team around the altar was rather more media-savvy than your average parish clergy. Was the ceremony intended to create scandal—that is, to legitimize behaviors that the Christian faith considers sinful? Was the sacrament being instrumentalized to serve a larger political and cultural agenda? Is it discriminatory to admit to the sacraments homosexual couples living in a situation contrary to the Church’s teaching when heterosexual couples in a comparable situation would be denied the sacrament? Or does the discrimination run the other way: Could it be that Benitez had been denied the possibility of repentance and a true spiritual rebirth by a watered-down creed of self-affirmation?

I’ll leave those rabbit holes to others. Unlike People, I am actually more interested in the sacrament of confirmation than in any of the sex questions. And of more concern to me than one celebrity confirmation is the much more common phenomenon of confirmation having become functionally the ceremony of graduation from Catholicism. 

There are lots of reasons why this is the case, including the order in which the sacraments of initiation are celebrated, but it seems to me that the root of the problem—and a deep root it is indeed—is that the sacraments of initiation have become detached from any notion of conversion.

The story of how this happened, however, doesn’t start in the previous pontificate, the 1960s, or even in modernity. It’s actually a medieval problem.

In the days of the Church Fathers, Christian initiation was an involved and demanding process; the reception of baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist was a life-changing event. It had to be. In a hostile pagan society, a muddled or ambiguous Christian identity would have guaranteed the dissolution of the faith in the more aggressive currents of the cultural majority.  

All of this changed, of course, with Christendom. When practically everyone was Christian, preparation for the sacraments—and mystagogy afterward—could be minimal to non-existent. Everyone was baptized more or less automatically at birth, so the first sacrament hardly seemed a rebirth. The surrounding Christian culture meant that Christian formation still happened, but mostly through cultural osmosis. One became a Christian by virtue of growing up in a Christian society. Even if the official theology never changed, the sacraments could become, in the popular imagination, rites of social belonging. For many, they became rites marking social, family, and life milestones—rather than rites conforming one to the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, we live in a culture that has largely come to resemble the pagan pluralism that surrounded the early Church, but our system of sacramental practice remains mostly that of Christendom. And it’s not working particularly well.

The Second Vatican Council provided at least a couple of tools to face this new—and old—reality: the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults with its extensive catechumenate—still perhaps not used to its full potential—and the theology of liturgical participation, which is almost universally misunderstood. As Pope Leo the Great once put it in an Ascension homily, what was once visible in Jesus when he walked the earth is made present for us in the sacraments. The unique grace of the sacraments is neither affirmation nor reward; it is being able to participate in the divine action of the Incarnate Christ.

This theology, in turn, explains why the arguments used to justify administering the sacraments to the indifferent and the unconverted amount to pious-sounding superstition. I’ve heard many an argument that boils down to: “Maybe they’re not ready, but, you know, the grace of the sacrament . . .”  

Sacramental grace, however, doesn’t work against our will or without our cooperation. It works because it is participation, because it allows us to cooperate. Administering the sacraments to those not yet ready and willing to live in communion with Christ and to be conformed to his Paschal Mystery is a bit like giving a placebo instead of chemotherapy to someone suffering from cancer—it may provide doctor and patient with a comforting moment but it won’t bring true healing.

That might work to serve People’s agenda, but when it comes to the mission of the Church, initiation into the fullness of Christian life is what really matters.

The post Sacraments of Initiation or Affirmation? appeared first on First Things.

Last month, Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, published a report through the Centre for Heterodox Social Science titled “The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans,” highlighting that “since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.” 

“Andover Phillips Academy in suburban Boston surveys over three-quarters of its students annually,” Kaufmann summarized at UnHerd. “In 2023, 9.2% identified as neither male nor female. This year, that number has crashed to just 3%. A similar story emerges at Brown University: 5% of students identified as non-binary in 2022 and 2023, but by 2025 that share had dropped to 2.6%.”

Kaufmann noted that in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey of U.S. college students, the percentage of students identifying as transgender halved from 6.8 percent in 2022 to 3.6 percent in 2025. Some scholars noted that it is primarily the “non-binary” identification that is plummeting; Kaufmann responded at length with evidence buttressing his thesis that “trans is in decline,” at least among young, educated Americans. 

In fact, the decline in non-binary identification has been accompanied by a ten-point plunge in other “unconventional sexual identification” that created the steep rise in LGBTQ-identifying youth in the first place, including the increasingly amorphous “queer,” “bisexual,” and simply “questioning”—that is, anything but straight, which was considered excruciatingly “boring.” 

Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, published follow-up research days later, analyzing data from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), gathered annually by YouGov. “[The data] show that identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the United States,” Twenge concluded. “Among 18- to 22-year-olds, trans identification fell by nearly half from 2022 to 2024. Nonbinary identification dropped by more than half between 2023 and 2024.” 

“When I looked at adults of all ages in the survey . . . I found a huge increase in identifying as transgender from those born before 1980 (Gen X and Boomers) to those born in the early 2000s (who are now 21 to 25 years old),” Twenge told Fox News Digital. “Identifying as transgender then declined, especially for those born in 2005 and 2006 (who are now 18 to 20 years old). I think the question now is not if trans is in decline, but how far it will fall.”

The full story behind the data is still unclear. Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright observed in the Wall Street Journal that trans identification is a “social contagion,” and that thus a “boom-and-bust pattern” is to be expected. Wright had his academic career nearly destroyed some years ago merely for referencing Dr. Lisa Littman’s social contagion research after Sweden’s Board of Health and Welfare noted a 1,500 percent spike in girls ages thirteen to seventeen identifying as transgender between 2008 and 2018.

There is certainly another cultural aspect to this. For a decade, identifying as LGBTQ was “cool”; to be anything but straight was to be celebrated, praised, and singled out for special attention, especially at schools and universities. Thus, the staggering rise in young people identifying as LGBTQ was not accompanied by a rise in same-sex activity, as one would expect if the surge was due to increasing social acceptance of alternative sexual lifestyles. 

Both Andrew Sullivan and Eric Kaufmann observed that youth were identifying as LGBTQ but acting straight. New identities were invented so that everyone could be LGBTQ; even Andrew Cuomo’s daughter came out first as queer, then as “demisexual”—a new “orientation” to describe people who develop sexual attraction after achieving emotional closeness. These new “orientations” are merely on-ramps for straight kids who don’t want to be left out during Pride Month; a real-life “hello, fellow gays” meme.

The “queer moment” may have peaked. J. K. Rowling’s relentless and brutally effective mockery of gender ideology has constituted a one-woman defenestration of the transgender movement. Celebrities like Keira Knightley now feel comfortable laughing at transgender boycotts rather than kowtowing. The LGBTQ movement achieved cultural dominance and is becoming predictably passé as they embrace the role of woke-scold censors. Can anything be less edgy and countercultural than Big Banks wrapped in the rainbow colors for Pride Month?

The LGBTQ movement still wields tremendous cultural power. They control Hollywood, the Democratic party, much of the educational system, and academia. They have been badly damaged by a string of studies highlighting the carnage wrought by sex-change “treatments,” court rulings condemning these practices, and laws on both sides of the Atlantic restricting them. The tragic stories of detransitioners like Chloe Cole have also begun to change the narrative. 

It is too early to tell, but the smart money is on Twenge’s analysis: Trans identification will continue to collapse. The only question is how far, and how much damage this social contagion will leave in its wake.

The post The Collapse of Trans Identification appeared first on First Things.

What is ironic about Altman’s announcement about adult content is that it was made in the same post in which he proclaimed that OpenAI wants to steward their customers’ well-being. He admitted that previous ChatGPT restrictions were meant to prevent “mental health issues,” but that the new policy would allow users with “no mental health problems” to get more out of the service. 

Three things are worth noting about OpenAI’s new policy. 

First, Altman’s comments about mental health ring hollow. Pornography is not safe for those without mental health issues. It is a cause of them. The November 2025 issue of Harper’s contains a report that is both impossible to recommend and impossible to forget. Daniel Kolitz profiles the “gooners,” a movement of proudly porn-addicted young men who structure their lives, their homes, and their relationships around masturbation. 

One of the key themes in Kolitz’s article is how the young men he profiles believe that porn and masturbation are their saviors from the cruel world of real women. Kolitz summarizes the philosophy of the young men this way: “[C]ompilations can’t give you chlamydia; a zip file can’t impugn your virility. But what a zip file also can’t do is lie to you.” One of the young men meekly admits, “I just feel like it’s exhausting. For both parties.”

Kolitz’s essay is one of the most effective arguments I’ve ever seen for the dissociative and depressive effects of pornography. As major AI companies follow the advertising money and allow users to generate their own sexual dysfunction, they assume a major role in the deepening mental and emotional freefall that Kolitz documents. This is not stewardship of public mental health. It is a greedy disregard for it. 

Second, the policy seems to justify skeptics of Silicon Valley’s utopian AI narratives. As educator and author Cal Newport noted in a recent newsletter, OpenAI is behaving like a firm that knows its technology isn’t all that revolutionary. Rather than changing the world, they are chasing the same attention-economy dollars that the rest of the internet has been chasing for decades. Newport observes that “these are the acts of a company that poured tens of billions of investment dollars into creating what they hoped would be the most consequential invention in modern history, only to finally realize that what they wrought . . . isn’t powerful enough on its own to deliver a new world all at once.” 

For all the hype about AI’s potential realignment of the global economy, it sure seems like its key use cases so far are porn and homework. This doesn’t rule out far-reaching effects of AI in the years to come, but Newport’s basic observation rings true. A technology purportedly ready to “change the world” wouldn’t need to sell clicks like this. 

Third, Altman acknowledges what many have predicted: The era of AI pornography is upon us, and many are not ready for it. 

For one thing, the ability to create custom images and videos will make it a more intensely addictive, personal experience. Users will almost certainly be able to feed AI systems pictures of real people and have the bot create pornographic content with their likenesses. The legal and social implications of this are legion. 

AI-generated content will also stress-test Christian arguments against porn. Appeals to porn’s exploitive character will not work in a world in which the characters on the screen are fake. The arguments against consuming or licensing pornography that will matter in the age of AI will be moralistic arguments: arguments rooted in the goodness of embodied sexuality in the context of marriage, and the destruction that occurs to hearts and minds by feasting on a fake version of sex that collapses us inward. “This is somebody’s child” will have to become, “You are somebody’s child.”

OpenAI’s new pro-porn policy is, sadly, a harbinger of things to come. The brave new world is no longer new. That’s why, in addition to theological and moral attention, proactive and clear political action is necessary. Courageous lawmakers will need to use legislation to prevent these companies from offering these services, knowing that the promise to “protect kids” is just as thin and facetious now as it has been for the last twenty years. Families need to take decisive steps now to push technology into open areas of the household and strictly limit what kids can access. And Christian churches should teach and preach boldly about God’s good design for sexuality and the possibility of healthy marriages between real image-bearers.

The post The Era of AI Porn Is Here appeared first on First Things.

Autumn also meant Halloween—and my birthday. My parents would throw me costume parties every October 26. The seriousness of growing older was always married to the playful freedom of Halloween. Trick-or-treating mattered less for sweets than for the opportunity to gallivant around the neighborhood with friends, reveling in the feeling that we could get away with anything, at least for one night. Halloween was for pranks, for terrorizing the girls at our elementary school dance. On one occasion, I ran transparent fishing line through the dark gymnasium, zig-zagging among clusters of sock-hopping girls. I fastened a mink pelt to one end of the line. (I had cut it from my mother’s stole.) Hiding behind a door, I reeled the line in, making the mink race like a huge rat around the girls’ feet. How they howled!

I have never experienced the real Halloween, though. The night of drunken carousing that now passes for Halloween bears little resemblance to the festival of old. Like spiders slurping the innards of a beetle, disenchantment and commercialization have bled it of meaning. And yet the carapace remains. Halloween’s history is a signal case of the process by which Western institutions descend into decadence.

“All that is meant by Decadence is ‘falling off,’” writes Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence. 

It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted. . . . Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.

This “falling off” is unmistakable throughout our cultural institutions. They have lost their animating force: the spirit of play.

In his celebrated study Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga defines play as “a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary life.’” In play, “real” life, the realm of the serious, is suspended, and we participate in realms that are altogether other. In doing so, we are changed. Set against ordinary life, play is non-serious, but in its own worlds it often achieves, even requires, high seriousness. For Huizinga, play is the genesis of myth and ritual and all that flows from them. Without the play-impulse, there would be no culture, no civilization, no language. 

If we agree with Plato that we “should live out our lives playing,” then the life of diminished play must be ignoble, something less than fully human. Today, Western civilization is dying because we no longer “play” at culture; lacking the generative powers of play, cultural forms and institutions are capable only of decadent repetition. We possess neither the playfulness proper to us as humans nor the reverence proper to us as creatures made in God’s image. As incapable of true play as of true seriousness, we are less than bestial, for even ­animals play.

Halloween originated in the Christian feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’. In the Catholic Church, All Saints’ Day commemorates the Church Triumphant, all those baptized believers who have obtained perfect union with God in heaven, with a special emphasis placed on those canonized by the Church. The observance of All Saints’ Day on November 1 can be traced to the mid-eighth century, when Pope Gregory III shifted the date from May 13. In Eastern traditions it is still observed in the spring, after Pentecost. 

The linked feast of All Souls’ Day commemorates the baptized souls in purgatory, the Church Penitent. Though both days were opportunities for remembering departed loved ones, All Souls’ Day featured intercessory prayer for those being refined in purgatory. Rituals of intercession underlie a few recognizable contemporary Halloween practices.

All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, known ­together in England as “Hallowtide,” were among the most important dates in the liturgical year by the end of the Middle Ages. Hallowtide was a period during which the faithful expected an increase of supernatural activity—both the evil and the benevolent kind. Church bells, believed to drive away demons, tolled all night. Many people anticipated visitations of the ghosts of loved ones and set extra ­places at the dinner table, or left food and drink out at night, a tradition that lives on in the ofrendas of Mexico’s Día de los Muertos celebration.

Because All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days reinforced the debt the living owed the dead, Hallowtide was a means of preserving a community’s historical consciousness. These festivals reminded people that they were a people, that they were connected as kin to others materially, through time and space, and spiritually, in the Mystical Body of Christ. 

This quality—of historical continuity, of duty to one’s ancestors and descendants—was essential to Halloween for most of its existence. But during the last century or so, Halloween has been robbed of this virtue.

A common but mistaken narrative presents Halloween as a Christianization of the ancient pagan festival of Samhain. Though there is little evidence of a cynical campaign by the Church to appropriate Samhain, after the dates of All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days were moved to November 1 and 2, elements of both traditions naturally merged, and today echoes of Samhain are easily discerned in Halloween. 

A Celtic harvest festival observed throughout Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man, Samhain marked the beginning of preparations for winter. Livestock were slaughtered in anticipation of the lean months, and ritual bonfires were lit in the belief that they would effect cleansing and confer protection. There is literary and archeological evidence that in pre-Christian times Samhain featured human sacrifice, a practice not uncommon among Celts and the tribes of northern Europe. ­Julius Caesar describes a particularly gruesome form of Druidic sacrifice in his Commentaries on the Gallic War: “Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame.” The image was put to unforgettable use in the British horror film The Wicker Man. 

Celebrated between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, Samhain was a “liminal festival” in which the fabric of reality grew thin and the Otherworld drew nearer to this world. The Celtic Otherworld was both the paradisal realm of faëries and the land of the dead—and certainly perilous to humans. It was believed that on Samhain the féth fíada, the magic fog that made the faëries (or elves) invisible to human eyes, lifted. “On that night in Ireland all the fairy hills are thrown wide open and the fairies swarm forth,” James Frazer writes in The Golden Bough. “Any man who is bold enough may then peep into the open green hills and see the treasures hidden in them. Worse than that, the cave of Cruachan in Connaught, known as the ‘Hell gate of Ireland,’ is unbarred on Samhain Eve or Hallowe’en, and a host of horrible fiends and goblins used to rush forth.” During Samhain, people would propitiate whatever faëries and spirits might be abroad by leaving out food and drink at night in hopes of a blessing for the coming winter.

The bonfires were used in divination rites, as were certain nuts and apples (thought to have a strong connection to the Otherworld). “Mummery” (pantomime) and “guising” (costuming) became common practices from the sixteenth century on. Youths, especially young men, would go from house to house costumed as denizens of the Otherworld, seeking payouts in exchange for blessings—a practice analogous to the “souling” and “doling” of Hallowtide, and a precursor to trick-or-treating.

Halloween in the British Isles was also characterized by a spirit of play, but unlike Samhain, it emphasized social inversion unique to the Christian imagination. In country parishes, community leaders would designate a “Lord of Misrule”—who reigned from Halloween to Candlemas—to spearhead the mischief. Revelers would parade around town and solicit contributions to keep the party going. Neighbors who refused were mocked and harassed. The Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs provides a colorful polemic against the revelry in Anatomie of Abuses (1583): The Lord of Misrule marched his “heathen company towards the Church and Church-yard, their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the route.” Frazer saw in this activity an extension of the ancient Roman tradition of crowning a mock king during Saturnalia, usually a slave who would be sacrificed at the festival’s end. The Christian festival, of course, embraces the joys of social inversion while dispensing with ritual murder. 

Amidst the tomfoolery, the dead were honored. All Souls’ Day, writes historian Nicholas Rogers in Halloween, featured “midnight vigils at gravesites and, until the eighteenth century, domestic offerings of food and clothing for the recently departed. As late as a century ago in Catholic Ireland, it was commonly believed that the dead would return on All Hallow Eve or on the days thereafter.” In certain English towns, the ghosts of those who would die in the coming year were believed to appear. The denizens of Faërie and the land of the dead, memorably depicted in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, experience time differently than we do.

Key to understanding the sociological function of Halloween is the idea of the carnivalesque, famously explored by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in books on Dostoyevsky and Rabelais. Medieval carnivals were festivals that preceded important moments in the liturgical calendar, such as Lent, featured parades and raucous street parties, and gave a general license to mischief. More than that, carnival involved its own worldview and was in many ways a world unto itself. 

As Bakhtin explains, “Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, they live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect.” As in all true play, the norms and laws of regular life are shelved. “People who in life are separated by impenetrable ­hierarchical barriers enter into free familiar contact on the carnival square.” Carnival is a great leveler, joining “the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.”

In practices central to carnival, such as “the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king,” the community embraces “the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal.” Carnival was cathartic, an opportunity to vent the steam of conflict that naturally builds within communities. 

Sanctioned transgression of the normative order has always been a feature of Halloween. The practice of divination, for example, was tolerated as a traditional custom during Halloween, whereas at other times of the year it would have been proscribed, especially among Protestants. In the 1960s, the transgressive element of Halloween was eagerly embraced by gay culture in American cities, where homosexual behavior was outlawed. Halloween became the quintessential gay holiday in San Francisco, the only night of the year when crossdressing and public indecency didn’t run the risk of arrest. The trend in San Francisco soon spread to Greenwich Village and other gay neighborhoods.

But as homosexuality was normalized in the late twentieth century, the importance of Halloween to gay culture faded. The sexual revolution made carnivalesque transgression part of the normative order. As far as sex goes, every day is Halloween.

In an act of politically imposed disenchantment, royal authorities in England implemented changes to Hallowtide practices reflective of Protestants’ hostility to Catholicism, especially the doctrine of purgatory. Edward VI banned bell ringing in 1548, and by 1559, during the reign of Elizabeth I, prayers for the dead were excised from the Anglican Litany. The state church soon ceased celebrating Hallowmass altogether, and in 1647 Parliament banned all festivals that smacked of Catholic influence. (The ban lasted until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.) There were Catholic holdouts, of course, who kept alive such practices as hilltop bonfires on All Saints’ Night.

More pervasive than fire rituals was the pre-­Reformation tradition of “souling,” which prefigured both trick-or-treating and jack-o’-lanterns. Supplicants walked about their towns carrying lanterns made from hollowed turnips, the candle representing a soul in purgatory, and solicited “soul cakes” from neighbors in exchange for praying for the souls of their loved ones. As Catholic influence waned, souling took on a more secular character. 

Though All Hallows’ and All Souls’ had lost much of their Catholic religious character by the mid-seventeenth century, they preserved their distinction as a time of supernatural activity. In Lancashire, candles and torches were wielded to repel witches and evil spirits. The liminal, supernatural character of Hallowtide survived the Reformation, but the theological import of practices such as souling and doling was lost, with dire consequences for the festival’s play-element. Huizinga writes that in play, “‘representation’ is really identification, the mystic repetition or re-presentation of the event.” By representing a soul in purgatory, a turnip lantern made purgatory real to the person carrying it. The loss of theological referents meant that the festival was becoming less a world unto itself and thus less animated by a spirit of play.

The distinctiveness of Halloween was further diminished by the popularity of the Fifth of ­November. On Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes was burned in effigy, often alongside the pope and other disfavored public figures. Many of the customs of Halloween were practiced on Guy Fawkes Night, among them souling and turnip lanterns. 

In Scotland, by contrast, Halloween retained its popularity. Over the centuries, its celebration became an opportunity for preserving the national character. Catholic Ireland likewise preferred Halloween to Bonfire Night, and many of the latter’s customs were transferred to the former, reversing the direction of appropriation in England.

Because Reformation disenchantment held less sway in Scotland and Ireland, space existed for the revival of certain older pagan customs. Nicholas Rogers notes that in the Scottish Highlands, “many of these customs recalled the fire rituals of Samhain that were to be found in the first Celtic sagas.” The link to Samhain was even stronger in Ireland, thanks to the preservation of Celtic oral traditions. The Catholic and pagan traditions were in tension, but not mutually exclusive. “The wandering spirits associated with ancient Samhain and the wandering souls of purgatory could be acknowledged at the same time, even by priests.” Such syncretism could also be observed in Scottish practice.

Though associations with Samhain lingered, the connection of Halloween to All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days grew attenuated. By the eighteenth century, Halloween was more an occasion for courtship and merrymaking than for solicitude for the baptized dead. 

Nonetheless, Halloween courtship rituals exuded an irrepressible spirit of play. Robert Burns preserves these rituals in his poem “Halloween,” which depicts young people engaging in a variety of divination practices to learn the identities and qualities of their future spouses and even their marriages’ fates. The rituals range from simple (saying a spell and looking into a mirror to scry the face of your spouse) to elaborate (hanging a wet shirtsleeve to dry near a fire and waiting until midnight, when an apparition of your lover would appear and turn the sleeve over to dry the other side). Some even involve consulting the Devil. The youths believe in the efficacy of these rituals, and they practice them with delight and not a little fear. For them Halloween is a time out of time, a world unto itself, possessing its own rules and ethos, permitting behaviors proscribed in “ordinary life.”

Because the Puritans despised Halloween for its connection to Catholicism and its pagan spiritualism, the holiday wasn’t observed in North America until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was introduced by Irish and Scottish immigrants. Consequently, Halloween was a marker of ethnic identity during the first decades of its observance. The promotion of the holiday by ethnic organizations, such as the Caledonian Society in Canada, emphasized its public, rather than its familial, character. Masquerades and street festivities were celebrated, increasingly to the exclusion of traditional fireside rituals.

This trend was exacerbated by urbanization. Wage-labor markets afforded a novel independence from family and community, deregulating courtship. Old traditions, especially roasting nuts to divine the success of romantic pairings, were still practiced, but as self-conscious performances of ethnic identity. Play’s quality as a world unto itself was diminished.

Merchants were quick to seize on the commercial opportunities afforded by the holiday, and one could buy Halloween masks in stores as early as 1874. Grocers promoted the sale of a variety of nuts suited to traditional practices, and by 1897 candy manufacturers were marketing to Halloween shoppers. Commercialization no doubt hastened the death of traditional Halloween practices, just as it had previously those of Christmas. As early as 1876, the New York Times could moan, “The glory of this once popular festival has departed. Its triumphs and rough jollities, festivals and strange rites are a matter of history, and live only in the immortal verse of Burns and traditional lore.”

While customs of home and hearth faded, other traditions were expanded, if also altered. Halloween had always had its gendered expressions, with girls more interested in romantic divination and boys more apt to venture outdoors in costume and roughhouse, and this distinction largely remained. But in more densely populated cities, the opportunities for mischief-making were endless, and pranking increasingly characterized the holiday. As had been the case in the British Isles, authorities customarily looked the other way. Pranking typically involved light vandalism, such as placing wagons on rooftops, but could get as ambitious as the greasing of streetcar tracks.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Halloween rowdiness had become so problematic in some places that one newspaper counseled readers to “load their muskets or cannon with rock, salt or bird shot and when the trespasses invade your premises at unseemly hours . . . pepper them good or proper.”

In the early twentieth century, college students became especially known for nefarious activity on Halloween, belying the idea that misbehavior was the domain of the lower classes. The Chicago Daily Tribune records a rather gruesome prank pulled by medical students at the University of Michigan on Halloween of 1900. “When the attendant whose office it is to open University Hall arrived to perform his duty, he was confronted by a hideous sight. Propped against the folding doors of the building and facing outward stood the headless corpse of a woman still swathed in the antiseptic bandages of the laboratory.” Because of its timing early in the fall semester, Halloween provided an opportunity for hazing freshmen, which included the common practice of marching downtown in costume and “rushing” theaters. Local populations grew weary of these collegiate shenanigans, and by the 1920s university administrators put an end to the rushes. When schools moved the start of ­classes to earlier in the fall, Halloween ceased to be a rite of passage. 

Throughout the twentieth century, the carnival inversion with the most staying power was the perceived license Halloween gave to destructive, often criminal, impulses. The 1934 Chicago World’s Fair concluded with a Halloween riot involving upwards of 370,000 people, many in costume. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on November 2: “As the evening wore on roistering groups began a mad hunt for souvenirs. Signs were ripped off of buildings and carried away. Then, as the lack of adequate police protection was realized, the souvenir hunting became vandalism. . . . Soon the general scene was one of wreckage.”

Halloween riots could be considerably more ­violent and destructive, and the 1930s and ’40s saw everything from race riots to arson sprees. The ­violence prompted efforts to “tame” the holiday. In 1950, for example, Harry Truman (unsuccessfully) directed the Senate to repurpose Halloween as a “Youth Honor Day.” Though “Youth Honor Day” sounds irredeemably hokey, it was just one part of a largely successful campaign across the ­United States and Canada to redirect youthful energy into pro-social activities, such as high school Halloween dances and other efforts to distract young men from jackassery.

Trick-or-treating, which gained popularity in the 1950s, was especially useful for defanging the holiday. In earlier generations, door-to-door doling carried the threat of recriminatory action if social obligations were unfulfilled. But, explains Rogers, the new “trick-or-treating sought to marginalize adolescent pranking and to defuse the antagonism inherent in the festive tribute, transforming the exchange into a rite of consumption.” 

Candy manufacturers began advertising their products in connection with door-to-door soliciting, and costumers promoted Halloween as an opportunity for conspicuous consumption. Gone were the homemade costumes of the interwar years; beginning in the 1950s, children bought their masks and outfits from retailers. Commercialization helped to infantilize Halloween by compromising its internal unity as play. “Not ­being ‘ordinary’ life,” writes Huizinga, “[play] stands outside the immediate satisfaction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process.” But when commercial interests are imposed upon it, play ceases to be a world unto itself and is robbed of its generative power. By the 1960s, Halloween had lost much of its former anarchy (and not a little of its charm). The spirit of carnival was replaced by spirits bought in liquor stores.

Less than a decade later, a new threat emerged. In the late 1960s, rumors of drug-tainted candy and razor blades in apples became commonplace. The accounts of “Halloween sadism” were almost entirely baseless, but they had a profound effect on the social imagination. Even venerable news outlets fanned the flames of moral panic. In 1970, for example, the New York State Health Commissioner warned New York Times readers: “Children should not eat any of their collected goodies until they have been carefully examined by an adult. In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison have appeared in the treats gathered by Children across New York State.” The claim was simply false.

The 1970s also saw the reemergence of Halloween rioting and large-scale destruction of property in urban centers. Detroit experienced the worst of it, with young men setting fires to abandoned houses, of which the city had no small supply. The arson reached its peak in 1983, when nearly a thousand fires were set during the three days surrounding “Devil’s Night.” As play ceases to be play, and as transgression is normalized across society, it would seem that carnivalesque transgression must be intensified to deliver a frisson.

Trick-or-treating survived the chaos of inner-city violence and threats of Halloween sadism, though its popularity waned considerably in the 1980s. Compared to its practice in the ’50s, when thick, homogenous communities meant that children could roam without supervision, it was much diminished, hemmed in by parental vigilance. And as Halloween was further hollowed out by social decay, consumerism continued to fill the vacuum. (Last year, Americans spent $11.6 billion on the holiday, $700 million of which was for pet costumes.)

If there’s one feature we have come to expect, it’s the close association of Hollywood horror films with Halloween. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1978 release of John Carpenter’s Halloween—the first film to use the word in its title—that this relationship crystalized. The slasher films that proliferated in the 1980s often timed their release to coincide with the Halloween season, and increasingly people’s costumes reflected the impact of film. 

About the same time that Halloween and Hollywood horror became entwined, the phenomenon of “haunted houses” got off the ground. Elaborately staged haunted houses offered a controlled environment in which to let off steam and indulge morbid curiosities. They were also another opportunity for entrepreneurs to cash in on the season, as anyone who has been to Knott’s Scary Farm or Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights can attest. But such big-budget productions were inspired by “home haunts” staged by enthusiasts for their local communities. These bootstrap productions fostered community bonding, hearkening back to the earlier social function of Halloween. Inside the haunted house, play is renewed: One submits to its rules, suspends ordinary norms, and takes joy in the tension of alternately surrendering to and resisting the scares. But, like so many other localist enterprises, home haunts were largely wiped out by zoning laws and that most frightening of specters: the liability lawsuit.

Halloween’s transformations since the late nineteenth century exemplify the fate of institutions under “liquid ­modernity,” Zygmunt Bauman’s term for “the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’—now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.” 

We can apply this observation to Halloween by means of an analogy: Some of the physical buildings that make up Harvard University are quite old, but the people, courses, ideologies, and identities that inhabit them change with increasing frequency. Much of the old form is still in place, but its content is in radical flux. A similar thing has happened over time with Halloween. The “forms” or tropes of Halloween have been emptied of their traditional content by the processes of secularization and commercialization. Costumes no longer gesture to genuine belief in faëries or spirits. The practices of “souling” and “doling” (now trick-or-treating) no longer bear any connection to belief in the afterlife, or to veneration of lost loved ones, or even to norms of mutuality. Jack-o’-lanterns no longer call to mind the souls wandering in purgatory, but refer only to themselves. Romantic games remain but no longer have marriage in view. For most people, Halloween is neither a reminder of the claims the dead have on the living, nor an anticipation of new life, futurity. We are left with only the eternal now of the market. The lingering customs and artifacts have been stripped of their referents; they are vacuums waiting to be filled and emptied and filled again, until we abandon them out of sheer boredom.

Josef Pieper writes: “In all religions, the meaning of a feast has always been the same, the affirmation of man’s fundamental accord with the world.” The wrinkle is that “there is no such thing as a feast ‘without Gods.’” Compared to the practices of living communities of faith, all our efforts to celebrate new feast days on grounds other than divine worship have been abortive. The same is true of our attempts to secularize the feast days of old.

Halloween’s carnival function barely survives, if at all. Though elements of inversion are still recognizable, they are less and less potent. Because ethical norms are now “liquid”—which is another way of saying that they are not really norms—there is scarcely anything left to invert.

If Halloween is to mean anything more than boozing and philandering, it will do so only in smaller contexts, where communities both acknowledge their normative orders and sanction inversions of those orders. The carnivalesque might still be possible in a place like Mormon Utah, which has done comparatively well at preserving traditional cultural norms. But even there, the porous, interconnected nature of our world threatens to rob social inversion of its catharsis. Carnivalesque play may be irretrievable for our time.

This is a shame. The laughter of carnival is powerful medicine—powerful precisely because it is shared, and shared within play’s transformation of reality. Humans are the only animals that laugh; we are Aristotle’s Homo ridens as much as Homo sapiens or Homo ludens. And, given our country’s current pathologies, we are in need of powerful medicine, medicine that transforms, ­re-humanizes. As ­Huizinga observes of politics, “it is the decay of humour that kills.”

“It was the victory of laughter over fear that most impressed medieval man,” writes Bakhtin. That victory reaches its zenith in Christian culture. Faith in Christ allows us to truly laugh in the face of death. “Where, O Death, is thy victory? Where, O Hades, is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55). Others may laugh at death—mockingly, nervously, nihilistically—but theirs is at bottom a laugh of despair. The Christian laughs in joy. When Christ was resurrected, surely the first sound to issue from his lips was joyous laughter. If Halloween is to retain any value for Christians, we must learn again to play in the laughter of Christ.

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The long view, stretching back to the London synod and beyond (by 1075, the Catholic Church had already been stamping down on cousin marriages for around seven centuries), shows just how far the NHS authors were flying in the face of settled custom—though not positive law—in England. The long view also demonstrates that, if the Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich is correct, the NHS was thumbing its nose at a cultural, religious, and social tradition that has benefited Britain enormously. The Church’s cousin ban, according to Henrich, is the Rosetta Stone of all British and Western exceptionalism: the historical event that unlocked the capacity to trust and cooperate with strangers, to resist pressure to conform, to respect rules—all of the peculiar psychological traits on which, Henrich argues, the best of the West was built.

The short view, on the other hand, is far more nakedly political, and tied to the increasing turbulence in British life on the subject of large-scale immigration. Cousin marriages are, in this respect, a new lightning rod for dissension. Approximately 3 percent of all marriages in the U.K. are between first cousins; however, about 55 percent of British Pakistanis, according to a 2021 study, are married to first cousins.

The children of these marriages have an increased chance of being born with genetic conditions and birth defects. Indeed, the NHS blog acknowledged this reality, and also noted that in the northern English city of Bradford, which has a large British Pakistani population, more babies are born with genetic conditions than elsewhere in the country. 

Soon after the blog was posted, Wes Streeting, the Labour politician who holds the health brief in Keir Starmer’s cabinet, demanded that the NHS apologize. The post was subsequently pulled. But then, in another twist, Sam Oddie, a neonatologist practicing in Bradford itself, came to the blog’s defense, calling it “very substantially factually based.”  

Elsewhere, Matthew Syed, a prominent columnist at The Times (whose father was a Pakistani convert to Christianity), has been using his platform to highlight the problems associated with cousin marriage, while expressing support for a Conservative MP who has brought forward a private member’s bill seeking to ban the practice. Syed has also posited that cousin marriage was the cement that bound together members of the so-called “grooming gangs” that have been committing child rape in certain English towns and cities for decades (a scandal that attracted the eye, and with it the ire, of Elon Musk).

The discussion of the consanguinity issue points toward wider trends—in particular, changes that are taking place in what is doable and sayable in Britain. Even the most casual observer will note that more and more people are starting to worry that English society is morphing into something unrecognizable. Today it is cousin marriage; tomorrow it could be polygamy, or honor violence, or female genital mutilation, or face coverings (which the governments of Italy and Portugal are now moving to ban).  

In an increasingly febrile atmosphere, these cultural practices—seen as unwelcome intrusions into the English way of life and engines of division—provide the disillusioned with stark, simple test cases for establishing the parameters of what the political classes, and especially the main political parties and their leaders, are prepared to say or not to say, to do or not to do. If mainstream politicians are seen to dither and obfuscate, or to look the other way, or to reach only for soft power solutions—more reviews, more research, more education—a further hardening of hearts and minds seems inevitable.  

And, with this, the road to Downing Street for Reform, Nigel Farage’s insurgent populist party, straightens, clears, and widens even more than it already has (if, that is, opinion polls turn out to be a reliable guide to how people will actually vote); the humiliation of the Tory and Labour behemoths becomes an even stronger prospect.  However, the next general election in the U.K. is not due to take place for just under another four years. Until then, it’s not going to be an easy ride for anyone.

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Shortly after I had a baby, I realized that what I had long understood by “feminism” had little to say about my new reality. Mothering appears in liberal feminism, if it appears at all, mostly as a problem to be solved. For the most part mothering, especially of very little children, comprises routine and repetitive small-scale activities ordered not to individual achievement or some grand project but to the sustenance of everyday life, for those too young to manage such things for themselves. Against this, the operative assumption of contemporary culture is that the “real” business of individual living is everything that happens with such routine labors as a backdrop: agency, ambition, achievement, consumer leisure. It follows that unless women can be freed from the everyday work of care, or those duties more “­equally” distributed, our access to “real” life will always be unfairly curtailed.

My baby is now nine years old. The intensity of her need has lessened. But these days I find myself wryly echoing my own mother’s words. Who does my daughter imagine picks up socks from the bedroom floor or cups from the table—the fairies? Patterns of care change over time, and children learn to contribute, but the invisible substrate of routine work will remain a political problem as long as “real” life is understood to be whatever happens against its backdrop. Even outsourcing it to domestic helpers just displaces the central question. As long as our scale of value weighs routine care and individual agency so asymmetrically, there seems no way to make the fruits of “real” life on these terms available to everyone. Someone will end up with the secondary role: clearing cups, picking up socks, and the mundane rest of it. 

But why does this asymmetry of value exist at all? Why are the fairies invisible? Two recent books, by authors worlds apart, seek to address the “Cinderella” domain. The Dignity of Dependence comes from Catholic writer and policy analyst Leah ­Libresco Sargeant, and The Care Economy from ecological economist and “degrowth” proponent Tim Jackson. 

From these different vantage points, both writers set out to make a case for the importance of dependence and care to human flourishing. Sargeant’s book, subtitled A Feminist Manifesto, tackles this question in the context of women, mothering, and our universal dependence on one another. The Care Economy explores the same question at the level of our larger economies. Both make valuable contributions in the face of an epistemological challenge whose roots lie deep in the past: How can we resolve a crisis that resists naming? But both stop short, for different reasons, of the metaphysics that dare not speak its name. 

Sargeant takes an intimate approach to this elusive subject. The Dignity of Dependence skips any attempt to contextualize either “­dignity” or “dependence” in a historical, cultural, or theological sense. Her argument is human-scale, and her tone conversational. Reading her feels like being drawn into discussion among a circle of warm and thoughtful friends, for whom the broader context is taken for granted. Sargeant blends personal anecdote with policy discussion and cultural commentary. She aims to free “dignity” from its thin modern sense of proud self-reliance, and “dependence” from its connotation of shame (a connotation especially strong in the culture that celebrates the Fourth of July). The resulting book is something akin to a phenomenology of everyday vulnerability and love.

Jackson’s project is more ambitious: wrestling with the question of “care” at scale. The Care Economy is a sequel to the influential Prosperity Without Growth (2009), which argued that we can resolve the ecological crisis only by reorienting our economies away from the mirage of never-ending growth and toward care and creativity. The Care Economy is Jackson’s attempt to go deeper into what such an economy might look like, but it documents Jackson’s own surprise at the difficulty of this conceptual challenge. What even is care? His solution—one I was not expecting in a book with “economy” in the title—is to exit the dry register of the “dismal science” entirely, for a dizzying array of personal stories, historical reference, literature, feminism, political theory, and analogies from cold-water swimming to cholera. One chapter even takes the form of a dream-sequence.

This surprisingly effective if impressionistic method converges on a definition of “care” as comprising all those repeating and homeostatic patterns that sustain normal health, either within an organism or in its relation to its ecological niche. Such patterns can be difficult to apprehend directly; their shaping power is discernible mainly in the traces they leave. Jackson’s allusive approach recalled my own love, as a long-distance runner, of England’s many unpaved and sometimes ancient byways. This landmass has been continuously inhabited for twelve thousand years. Some of its paths are trodden so well that they are known as “hollow ways”: roads of such ancient provenance and use that they are worn yards deep into the surrounding landscape. It is easier to measure the height of their banks than to apprehend the millennia of human and animal footfall, and associated life-patterns, that carved them. In English folklore they are often associated with fairies, a detail that captures at the level of landscape both the invisibility and the elusive magic that (like laundry fairies) hides in the realm of routine.

Jackson’s attempt to evoke this realm resonates with my own experience of mothering’s iterative quality and its fundamentally relational nature. So it is no surprise to find that Sargeant’s book seeks to surface all those ordinary ways in which, as we meet the needs of dependents, we are patterned in relation to others’ needs, never existing only “for” ourselves. In pregnancy, a woman’s very body is essential for her baby’s survival. The baby experiences the most complete dependence, and the mother confronts the ­ambiguity of her physical boundedness. Set against these realities, Sargeant shows, the “lonely individual,” the protagonist of contemporary “real” life, is a lie. Each of us begins and ends life vulnerable and dependent. Adults, too, track the hollow ways carved by dependence and need. 

And yet, as I discovered as a new mom, our social world is ordered to obscure this reality. Women become mothers in a world structurally blind to interdependence, pattern, and ordinary need. As Sargeant shows, the result is a mismatch between what we ­believe reality is and what reality is for women. This mismatch extends all the way from individual efforts to reconcile the embodied relations of pregnancy and breastfeeding with an employment environment that only grudgingly accommodates this ordinary feature of human life to the struggles faced by policymakers in responding to the kaleidoscopic range of social care needs across areas such as health, housing, and welfare. 

And for those feminists who otherwise believe in the supposed interchangeability of men and women, the result has often been, in Sargeant’s words, “helping women be better men”—that is, directing the full force of economic and technological innovation at flattening every last trace of our difference. The Dignity of Dependence is a persuasive tour of all those ways in which the contemporary world relies on our continued willingness to respond to one another’s need, all while treating this (like the sock fairy) as mere backdrop to, or ­fuel for, “real” (which is to say economic) life. Sargeant is at her most gently polemical, and rhetorically moving, in the chapter that shows how the price is ultimately paid by those most dependent of all: unborn babies.

But the price of our lack of care is also, Jackson argues, visible in the ecological crisis now unfolding across our planet. It isn’t merely a matter of economic theory. Our difficulty in thinking through the dimension of care seems bound up in our deepest values, and ­especially in relations between the sexes. It is thus, as Jackson notes, principally feminists who have sought to theorize care. Those feminist authors, though, oppose care to violence and link violence with men. This framing of violence as the antonym of care, whether in “­patriarchal” hierarchies or in extractive relations to the planet, is the most conceptually underdeveloped aspect of the book, for reasons I will return to. But it accurately sketches the association between our blindness to care and the forces that are disordering sex relations and ecologies. 

The Care Economy ultimately fails to name this force beyond the (for progressives) conventional villain “capitalism,” a framing that, to my mind, puts the cart before the horse. But it is a reasonable enough inference when efforts to recoup care so often end up re-ordered to profit. There exist whole libraries of academic work devoted to naming and understanding the forces of nature and the ecological crisis. Care is likewise abundantly theorized, especially by feminists. And yet every time such theories appear, they somehow end up either ignored or turned against their original spirit. My own feminist inquiry, as a new mom, began with puzzlement at the way every feminist challenge to the erasure of dependence somehow seemed to end in policy solutions that promised to “solve” dependence in the name of freedom. Similarly, as Jackson observes, in the field of ecology the result of every warning about the long-term ­consequences of our extractive technological paradigm, and our pursuit of never-­ending growth, ends up as another burst of extractive technological development, which is then hailed as offering both “green” improvements and more economic growth. 

Why? As we have seen, the discursive space of care is riddled with blind spots and omertàs. And we find a path leading into this territory through a topic that is conspicuous in both texts chiefly by its absence: Christianity. It is almost impossible to make sense of two millennia worth of care without acknowledging the role of the Christian Church, and especially Catholicism. But though this path is trodden so deep that it forms a hollow way in our civilization, today its tracks are overgrown with nettles, its signposts torn down or painted over. 

Even so, its patterns shape both books. Jackson formally disavows Christian faith, asserting in his chapter on the spiritual dimension of care both that we need a “sacred canopy” to hold communities of care together and that religion has “failed” to supply this good. We can infer from the fact of his having written The Care ­Economy that secular liberalism and market society have done little better, and it is not clear what secret third thing might provide an alternative to “religion” and “not religion.” Be that as it may, Christianity merits only a handful of references. The only positive one is a passing observation that our concern for the sanctity of human life is about 2,000 years old. No reason for this oddly specific number is supplied. Otherwise the principal context in which the Church appears is a reference to that gender-­studies ­cliché, ­Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, a witch-hunting ­manual that Jackson presents as evidence of how Christian doctrine has been deployed to oppress women. Christians might protest that relative to the Roman mores it displaced, the Church has done more to accord women ­personhood than to withhold it from them—though there is no denying that Christian doctrine is sometimes misused in this way. Regardless, it is difficult even to frame this debate without acknowledging its debt to the Christian doctrine of personhood. 

This in turn produces a deep confusion in Jackson’s definition of violence as the antonym of care, where care is understood as the totality of homeostatic, patterned relationality across human and natural worlds. There are, after all, many examples of interactions in the natural world that both fit this description of homeostatic patterns and are inescapably violent. The most obvious example is, of course, predation for food. Is this not care, in the context of a mother tiger feeding her young? What is different about human violence, or indeed male violence against women? Jackson cannot easily unpack this without drawing a distinction between the nature of animals and that of humans, thus inviting further questions about what we mean by “human” and by “nature.” And by this point he would find himself already walking the overgrown and much-maligned Christian hollow way.    

Given the dominance of secular liberalism across academia and environmental activism, it is perhaps understandable that Jackson’s text has white-labeled anything too obviously theological. The almost total absence of overt Christian reference in The Dignity of Dependence is more puzzling, especially given that the author’s other works include Building the Benedict Option and Arriving at Amen. But even as an avowed Christian, Sargeant faces the same constraint as ­Jackson: From the frontispiece to The Dignity of Dependence we learn that the series of which her book forms a part is “Catholic ideas for a secular world.” We can reasonably infer that the text’s confessional coyness reflects the author’s recognition of the same secular-liberal injunctions that apply to Tim Jackson. 

This acknowledged, the careful reader will note that though there are few overt references Catholicism in the book, Sargeant’s bibliography has a distinctive flavor. For example, when she cites big-name liberal feminists such as de Beauvoir or ­Friedan, it is generally only as foil for her counter-argument. By contrast, we find approving quotes of G. K. ­Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and contemporary Catholic feminists such as Angela Franks. 

Jackson attempts to route around Catholic thought, then, while Sargeant is merrily dogwhistling. Had the prevailing culture left the authors freer to engage directly with extant work in this tradition, both would have been well advised to begin with the Catholic priest and social critic Ivan ­Illich, and especially his controversial 1982 work Gender. 

The absence of this text is no slight on either author, as its argument proved so enraging to his hitherto adoring left-wing readership that Illich was abruptly cancelled for writing it, and Gender remains “problematic” to this day. But it sheds crucial light on the epistemological problem at the heart of both Jackson’s and Sargeant’s works by connecting the modern transformation of sex relations with the shift from steady-state economies to modern “market society.”

It is a dense text, but in very brief terms: Illich argued that whereas the premodern world was everywhere irreducibly dual and ordered by “vernacular gender” as distinct worlds of men and of women, the dismantling of this duality was a crucial precondition for our entry into modernity. What Illich characterizes at the intimate level of families as “the destruction of gender” manifests itself, he argues, at the macroeconomic level as modern growth-based market society. Following the destruction of “vernacular gender,” a new, genderless order arose. The protagonist of that order would come to play a central role in Jackson’s academic field, economics: the purportedly unisex homo economicus, first seen in the work of Adam Smith. And yet, Illich points out, humans are never unisex. And as he argued, and Sargeant persuasively shows, this imaginary, unisex, unattached homo economicus is a poor fit for women’s embodied and relational needs. The result is a modern social order that is “both genderless and sexist”: that is, one that both pretends we are all interchangeable and, as a consequence of this falsehood, produces a world in which women are structurally ­disadvantaged. 

In fairness to Jackson, Illich does show up in The Care Economy, though only in the context of his critique of medicine. Jackson’s muddled effort to grapple with the question of care and what he terms “patriarchy” would have benefited from Illich’s analysis of the relation between modernity, growth economics, and “the destruction of gender” in favor of “economic sex.” Sargeant, for her part, does not refer to Illich at all; and yet a great deal of The Dignity of Dependence reads like a descant on Illich’s argument concerning the structural mismatch between the purported unisex homo economicus and the embodied reality of our sexed nature. 

Beyond and behind Illich, though, the hollow way of Catholic thought stretches deeper into the past. Its ancient contours can be discerned in the overall message of The Dignity of Dependence: that we might get further, as feminists and as functioning societies, by ditching the lonely fiction of homo economicus for a more realistic assessment of human nature. But here we run up against another of modernity’s epistemological blind spots. It is almost impossible to assert, in terms digestible within secular liberalism, that humans even have a normative nature—witness Jackson’s unhappily wrestling with the well-documented fact that men and women are normatively different, and men are on average more violent than women. This taboo is so complete, and has so far-reaching a set of political consequences, that I have previously characterized it as a dogma or bigotry: “normophobia” (First Things, April 2024).

The taboo this dogma places on whole fields of epistemology explains the unusual, allusive form of Jackson’s book. He can approach his topic only obliquely, for his project is to make the case for an economy predicated on human nature, without violating the secular liberal convention that human nature does not exist. Resolving this technical challenge takes him some 300 pages. For the premodern world, though, the same terrain might be summed up in two words: the master-concept of “kindly enclyning,” as characterized by C. S. Lewis in The Discarded Image. Of these, “kindly” needs the most glossing, for no shift in meaning more vividly captures the gulf between that older world and our own. In its medieval sense, “­kindly” denotes something like “in accordance with its type or nature.” In the modern sense it conveys something far less forceful, along the lines of “benign.” “Enclyning” also conveys an insight alien to modern thought: the notion that things “incline” to characteristic patterns of behavior through qualities innate to their type or “kind.”  

In the era of “vernacular gender,” the technical term for the “kindly” qualities of a thing would have been its “formal cause,” as in the nature that “causes” it to take the form it takes. Its “enclyning” is, properly speaking, its “final cause”: the end to which it is directed. These concepts, first formulated by Aristotle, were most famously elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas, and they played a central role in the premodern account of reality. But this picture of the world, as structured in part by the nature and inner directedness of all things, was bracketed and then discarded by the scientific method. Francis Bacon’s 1620 treatise Novum Organum (“new method”) argued that formal and final cause should be abandoned as insufficiently grounded in empirical reality. Bacon proposed a new way of seeing, one that would limit its inquiry to the remaining two of ­Aristotle’s original four “causes”: the efficient and the material, which is to say, the forces that act upon something, and the stuff of which the something is made. In turn, Bacon argued, humans themselves could learn to understand, master, and finally direct the world’s efficient and material aspects, wresting all of nature from its own “kindly enclynings” and re-ordering it to “the relief of man’s estate.” 

The whole matrix of economic growth and technological development, on which Jackson focuses his critique, developed upon this metaphysical contraction from four to two ­causes. So too, and concurrently, did “the destruction of gender” in favor of “economic sex.” And so, too, does the literary challenge, faced alike by Sargeant and Jackson, of articulating a realm of care whose ­elusiveness and invisibility is one result of this erasure of formal and final causes. 

For this is the blind spot both these fine writers seek to tackle: the nature and directedness of things. As Sargeant shows, humans are not free-spinning atoms. We have normative needs and are relationally directed. Gestation and breastfeeding are only the most obvious, concrete examples of this directedness and its consequence: that some aspects of our life in common cannot be flattened into abstract “equality.” Similarly, The Care Economy argues that in recognition of the patterned nature of all life, our economies should be reoriented so as to prioritize what is valued by pattern: maintenance, care, and interdependence.

But both these cases are exceptionally difficult to make from within what the philosopher Mark Shiffman has called “Baconian civilization.” A worldview that has foreclosed formal and final cause will naturally insist that any defense of pattern, care, and interdependence must first make the case that they exist and have value, which ­i­nvariably leaves little airtime for the concrete suggestions that might follow. Of the two authors, my sense is that Sargeant is most alive to the metaphysical origin of these constraints. The careful reader will catch a Thomistic note in her plea for social relations more truthfully aligned to human nature. It is testament to the ongoing power of the Baconian taboo that for a secular audience, adding metaphysical categories back into an argument would necessitate so lengthy a digression as to render the result unreadable. In consequence, even an avowedly Catholic author must confine herself to a nudge and wink.  

With form and meaning thus silenced, we have forgotten how to see the world in its relational and normative aspects—forgotten how to focus not on the “signal” or exception but the rule; to focus on what usually happens and the habits, kinds, and hollow ways of “enclyning.” Instead we learned to master the world and reorder it to our own desires. But despite its many gifts, this mastery has cost us dearly, as Baconian civilization redefined the world’s normal patterns as “natural resources” for exploitation, leaving them by degrees more depleted, poisoned, and strip-mined. Human sociality is being strip-mined to exhaustion, too, by a culture and economy in which human nature and directedness are treated as though they did not exist—or at other times are treated as if they existed and were endlessly malleable but could nonetheless be expected to endure all these insults unchanged, continuing to serve as backdrop to the “real” business of self-optimization and shopping. The result can be seen in the collapse of family formation, the worsening well-being of both children and adults, and the looming disaster of an aging population facing senescence amid a culture that views dependence as a moral failing. 

In this context, the metaphysic that dare not speak its name is once again speaking—even if only through omission and desperate need. For the methodical expulsion of form and meaning from reality has produced, by degrees, our current sense of social and ecological omni-crisis: a situation now so desperate that even secular liberals are seeking ways to reverse-engineer, or perhaps just rediscover, the hollow ways. The fact that two such thoughtful voices as Sargeant and Jackson have converged from opposite sides of the Atlantic, and of the political aisle, to grapple with this issue speaks to its urgency. 

Both books shy away from policy, but what each calls for is really a precursor to policy as such: a change in how we see. We must relearn to perceive the normative, homeostatic, interdependent dimension of life for what it is: not an illusion to be dispelled by empiricism, an inert stockpile of “natural resources,” or even a hollow way where the fairies sometimes pass, but something real on its own terms. Though obscured, this plane of “kindly enclyning” never really went away, and neither did our real dependence upon it. We need only open our eyes to what is usual.

The post Metaphysics of Care appeared first on First Things.

I now know that my experience was representative of the murky conflict within the Church over liberalization—for liberalization has occurred primarily not through changes to the doctrines on sin, but through the deemphasizing of sin and of the institutions for its control, such as confession. My RCIA experience was not atypical; some parishes are more explicit on these points, but many are not. I’ve also encountered younger Catholics who say that, despite growing up in the Church and attending CCD through confirmation, they were never taught about sin or the necessity and mechanics of confession. I’m doubly on the flashpoint, because remarriage is currently the next frontier of liberalization.

Proponents of this settlement wish to make the faith more welcoming to people with modern values or in difficult life situations. I am a blue-stater and sex-positive child of the sexual revolution, and a struggling mother of teenagers, living post–civil divorce. My religious conversion experience strongly suggested to me that this church was the one I should turn to, but to approach Catholicism was to override a lifetime’s opposition to many of the Church’s positions. If I’d understood more clearly what those positions were, I would have opposed them even more strongly. In this sense, there was wisdom in my RCIA priest’s welcoming, intellectual approach, which discussed love, friendship, the Trinity, religious art, and the role of the Church in the world, and didn’t tackle controversial topics. Had I been presented with a harsh and incomprehensible list of sins upon first meeting, it is possible (perhaps, if we discount God’s agency in the matter) that I would have shrugged and looked elsewhere.

But I didn’t, not even when I learned that my Catholicism was about to enter mortal conflict with my heart’s other great desire, which was to form a new romantic partnership. And since my conversion, unfortunately for my heart’s desire, the most rewarding, intellectual, generative, and faith-deepening parts of my Catholic experience have involved engagement with dogmatic teaching on sin and the practice of confession—the strict Church, not the tolerant one. It has been lovely to meet the members of my RCIA group and to make church friends. The spiritual feeling of attending Mass is enjoyable. But these have been only small parts of the offering. Without sin and the relationship between the Eucharist and confession, I’m not sure what I would have been doing all this time or how I would have grown.

So what happens when a person with secular liberal values concerning sexuality—this, mostly, is the controversial part—has a good-faith encounter with modern Catholicism? First, it’s very difficult to get information about what the Church actually teaches and requires. When I first discovered the prohibition on remarriage, I made an appointment to discuss it with my priest, a wonderful man who has greatly ­influenced me and had already become a friend. Before the meeting, I observed that this restriction contradicted what I saw all around me. We had openly cohabiting unmarried couples in RCIA. I knew remarried people who’d seemingly been devout Catholics all their lives. Everyone at Mass on Sunday seemed to shuffle up front, and surely they weren’t all without sin. I expected my priest to confirm that the rule was a technicality, or a matter of personal conscience, but I found him ­unexpectedly firm, which landed me in delicate territory. What had seemed an obvious point—that no one was really doing this—suddenly became taboo.

I asked a few questions about this restriction—such as “But what about unmarried couples with children?”—and received unworldly, incomprehensible answers, such as that they might live together “like brother and sister.” This seemed like the old, sex-fearing, woman-fearing Catholic Church we know from the newspapers, but I didn’t want to say that to my priest, nor did I want to insist on the value of physical intimacy to a celibate man. Women are in an especially uncomfortable position in such conversations. I left confused, plagued by wild speculations. Could I have regrettable casual sex, a sin that could be honestly confessed, forever, and still take the Eucharist, but not form a stable partnership? What kind of system was that? I also felt some indignation. The Church proposes to regulate our sex lives but won’t create the conditions in which to talk about it?

For me, the uncertainty led to a search for more answers. By an incredible coincidence spanning the Vatican City and rural Vermont (or by divine intervention, if you wish), I made a new friend, a militant young priest whose challenging preaching about sin made it seem possible to challenge him in return. He provided me with an old-fashioned examination of conscience and explained the theory of “unitive and generative” sexuality. This was another excruciatingly awkward conversation, and it revealed concepts even more outrageous in view of my former value system, but we got it done. Again I went away horrified, but this time I had a lot to think about, and more importantly, I had something to do. I would have to look at the list, understand it, and then blow it off or not, confess or not, take the Eucharist or not. My conscience was engaged, no longer in the misty way wherein I hoped for opportunities to love my neighbor or make charity a greater part of my life, but in a daily struggle with questions on much more than sexuality. Was I really supposed to pray every day? And keep Sundays free of heavy labor? Such practices didn’t fit modern reality and seemed weirdly legalistic and too small to be relevant—­gardening on a Sunday is a sin? This is dumb. Yet there it was, on the list.

I started going to confession (a saga of its own in a big, busy city with few available hours and a crazy-­quilt of procedures). I couldn’t not, once I knew it was required of me. I had an inner voice, and I listened to it. I more or less confessed to the sins on the list, and when I didn’t really think they were sins, I confessed to doubting the word of the Church, too. Slowly I began praying for something my rational mind did not want, which was to actually believe this stuff. I can’t pray to be single forever; it goes too deeply against my heart. But I can pray to do Christ’s will instead of my own, so I pray for that. I didn’t take the whole list seriously all at once, nor did I always recognize all of the sins as sins, and I probably still don’t, but over time I’ve understood more. And I started modifying my behavior, not because I was fully convinced, but because I wanted to take the Eucharist, and it was inconvenient to have to confess.

None of this has been easy, morally or logistically. I’m free of mortal sin and able to take the Eucharist around once every six weeks—not a great record. But it has been profoundly, almost comically rewarding. People with active prayer lives know the way prayers are answered, and the way answered prayers provide new signposts toward the good. I would likely never have learned this if I hadn’t been prompted to daily prayer by the examination of conscience. And people who make some attempt to keep their Sundays free for God know the lovely Sabbath feeling of a clean house and a waiting heart on Saturday night (or the pleasant, lazy feeling of blowing off all work till Monday). In fact, every time I’ve overcome my own will and prejudices to try one of the list’s impossible demands, revelation has followed, offering deeper faith, spiritual insight, and often bizarre and unexpected real-world rewards. 

The Church’s restrictions on sexuality have been the most difficult teachings for me to ­consider—they’re such a radical departure from my former standards. To tell people what to do with their own bodies, and then to police them on it, feels like a violation of human dignity from a sex-positive perspective. I was taught as a child that what the Church calls “self-abuse” is an act of self-respect and self-care, the foundation of a healthy sexuality. And for my whole life, the free expression of one’s sexuality has been both an impassioned cause and a human right. It’s the restraint words that seem grotesque to me: modesty, chastity, celibacy. I have been to sex parties and seen endless pornography, and would discuss either with glee in the right company, but in most social situations I’d be actually ashamed to talk about sexual restraint.

Yet the more I’ve considered the “unitive and generative” approach, the more it seems to solve many of our vast social problems by drawing a clear line in the only place where it can reasonably be drawn. And it conflicts less than expected with the deeper underpinnings of my former beliefs. As a secular person, I was sex-positive because I thought sex was very, very important, perhaps even a window onto the sacred. Reordering one’s vision of sex around a utopian ideal, as the Church demands, isn’t really such an outrage, especially in a world where so many people seem unhappy, damaged, and isolated in their sexuality, and where the results of liberalization have become increasingly toxic. Moreover, when I learned the hidden truth about the Church’s restrictions for all people, it made what had seemed like a double standard for gay people much more palatable. The half-measures in communication are underselling a beautiful doctrine.

As for the painful issue of remarriage, so far I’ve made the uneasy compromise of occasionally dating while also beginning proceedings for a hoped-for annulment. I pray that someday God will bring me a man with whom I can have a legal union from the Church’s perspective. Even this is a huge change from my previous plans—I used to joke that I’d be a serial monogamist forever—but I’m trying, however imperfectly, to submit my will to Christ’s. Like my other attempts, it has been beneficial. Reorienting my thoughts toward remarriage has had a wonderfully clarifying effect on my romantic encounters and has revealed just how ­carelessly I’ve treated other people, and myself, in the past. To me it seems that these onerous rules, when taken ­seriously, force us into an inner alignment with things we, in our deepest hearts, already knew. We resist. We insist on our own will and that we know what’s good for us, which is a breathtaking assertion, really, when you consider how much pain most of us bear. And so often we’re wrong.

It is this Church, and only this Church, that rolls up its sleeves, militantly and gently, offering the lists, the booths, the men on duty if you need them, the long slow interplay of experience and self-examination, aided by prayer and the promise of the Eucharist as a reward. Confession is beautiful, despite the difficulties. More converts should be aware of it.

The post How I Learned to Love Confession appeared first on First Things.

Richard was a passionate partisan of New York City, which he sometimes described as a preview of the New Jerusalem, but the Gray Lady’s parochialism nonetheless led him to occasionally dismiss New York’s most prestigious daily as a “parish newsletter.” He regularly castigated the Times’s editorials for their air of smug infallibility. And then there was RJN’s annoyance (and more) with the Times’s knee-jerk liberalism, which, by its embrace of every imaginable left-of-center cause, accelerated the decay of liberal politics into the promotion of lifestyle libertinism. Richard was thus years ahead of Joseph Ratzinger in issuing warnings about a dictatorship of relativism, the unavoidable political outcome of the Times’s cultural lurch leftward.

On the other hand, Richard Neuhaus could no more imagine skipping the New York Times in the morning than he could imagine beginning the day without numerous cups of coffee, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and a smoke.

That love-hate relationship was crystallized in an incident during Richard’s days as a Lutheran pastor in the then-impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, when the Times declined to refer to a local black pastor (from Christendom’s entrepreneurial Protestant subdivision) as “Bishop” so-and-so. In high dudgeon, RJN wrote A. M. Rosenthal, then the Times’s managing editor, and asked what was going on. The man referred to himself as “Bishop.” His people called him “Bishop.” The sign on the front of his ecclesiastical establishment identified him as “Bishop.” Who did the Times think it was, and what did the Times think it was doing, denying this man the title he and his people used?

Abe Rosenthal eventually wrote Richard a harrumphing letter, stating that, after the painstaking deliberation appropriate to the nation’s newspaper of record, the Times would henceforth refer to the gentleman in question as “Bishop” so-and-so. The letter then concluded with a sentence that would cause Richard Neuhaus to laugh uproariously for decades: “And so, Pastor Neuhaus, you may take some satisfaction from knowing that, in drawing this matter to our attention, you have made a small contribution to the history of our times.”      

Or words to that effect, if I may be pardoned for quoting the loathsome Richard Rich in A Man for All Seasons.

Over thirty-plus years of friendship and collaboration, I must have heard Richard tell that story a dozen times, but I don’t think I’d thought of it more than once or twice since his death in 2009. Then, recently, I read an article indicating that a churchman I admire, who indicated some sympathy with the charge that the Catholic Church in the West is “obsessed” with questions of sexual morality, nonetheless himself used the term “LGBTQ Catholic.”

Now, as a matter of good manners, I agree with the substance of Richard’s complaint to Abe Rosenthal: People should usually be identified the way they identify themselves, and in any event, it was not up to the New York Times to decide who is and who isn’t a bishop. But a churchman using the term “LGBTQ Catholic” of any member of the Catholic Church seems to me a different matter.

First, it strikes me as incoherent to give at least a nod of credibility to the charge that certain sectors of the world Church are obsessed with sexual morality and then use the hypersexualized term “LGBTQ Catholic”—which, whatever its provenance, reduces an individual to their sexual desires, confusions, or both.

Second, as was pointed out at several synods beginning with Synod 2018, this usage has no warrant in Catholic history, for the Church has never identified its members by libido. Which means it’s just as untoward to speak of “heterosexual Catholics” as it is of “LGBTQ Catholics.” Why? Because “you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28) and subdividing Catholics this way fractures the unity of the Church.

Finally, in this political and cultural moment, the term “LGBTQ Catholic” is both the carrier of a theological program—the transformation of settled Catholic understandings of the human person and the moral life—and an emblem of various political causes: causes not untinged by the threat of Ratzinger’s “dictatorship of relativism.” The term “LGBTQ Catholic” is not neutrally descriptive; it is, rather, quite loaded, theologically and politically.

We are all sinners in constant need of the redeeming grace of Christ, as Pope Leo XIV forcefully reminds us. When we remember that, we will perhaps be less inclined to countenance delineating each other (and ourselves) by sexual desire, orientation, or practice.

George Weigel’s column “The Catholic Difference” is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.

Image by Another Believer, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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This development is not unprecedented. In 1950, Partisan Review ran a series titled “Religion and the Intellectuals.” The authors included Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, John Dewey, Robert Graves, A. J. Ayer, Sidney Hook, and Paul Tillich. The editors’ introduction could describe our own moment:

One of the most significant tendencies of our time, especially in this decade, has been the new turn toward religion among intellectuals and the growing disfavor with which secular attitudes and perspectives are now regarded in not a few circles that lay claim to the leadership of culture. There is no doubt that the number of intellectuals professing religious sympathies, beliefs, or doctrines is greater now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that this number is continually increasing or becoming more articulate. If we seek to relate our period to the recent past, the first decades of this century begin to look like decades of triumphant naturalism; and if the present tendency continues, the mid-century years may go down in history as the years of conversion and return.

That last claim now looks wide of the mark. As significant as that revival of elite sympathy for religion might then have seemed, it did not initiate a long-term change in the overall direction of the West or the cultural fortunes of Christianity.

It is too early to know whether today’s revival will prove more than a fad. But like the earlier one, it indicates something about its context. Today, as in the aftermath of World War II, what it means to be human is contested. Those who perceive this are seeking a stable foundation for an answer, and they are seeking it in religion. The turn to ­theological matters is one response to an anthropological problem.

It was likewise in 1950, as the world emerged from the slaughter of war, facing the realities of the Holocaust and the spread of communism. Technology, too, posed new challenges. As Sartre commented, the advent of atomic weapons placed human beings in an unprecedented situation: They had to decide to continue to exist. Today the question of what it means to be human is, if anything, more vexed. Yet the shift in the rhetoric surrounding religion offers a glimmer of cultural and ­political hope.

To adapt a phrase from Nietzsche, the problem in our modern world is that man is dead and we have killed him. The concept of human nature is no longer subject to any kind of consensus, with obvious and catastrophic implications for society. Man has been abolished. So what has led to this abolition? Four causes suggest themselves: Human nature has been dismantled, disenchanted, disembodied, and desecrated.

The dismantling has various ­causes. The Christianity that shaped western ­societies’ anthropology was teleological, exemplified by the thought of Thomas Aquinas and summarized in the first question-and-answer of the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Humanity was defined by a purpose that transcended the desires of any individual. Man had ends that defined him, some natural, some supernatural. But teleology has been rare in western thinking for generations. As ­science restricted its consideration of causes to the efficient and the material, understandings of the significance of the world, and therefore of human nature, were transformed. The most obvious examples are theories of evolution that eschew final causality. As they have shaped the modern cultural mindset, they have dismantled the notion of human exceptionalism.  When man has no God-given end, he has no stable or distinct nature. In killing God, we kill man.

The point was made by Nietzsche in his critique of Kant. One could not murder God and then expect human nature to do the late God’s work for him. If God had died, so had the notion that human beings were made in his image. Nietzsche’s program was pursued with vigor in the twentieth century by Michel Foucault, who dismantled the notion of human beings as self-constituting, rational agents. He saw them as the hapless products of networks of discursive power relations, a view that now rings out from countless university seminar rooms and underpins the rhetoric of identity politics, left and right.

The irony is that man’s very brilliance—­instanced by his intellectual curiosity, analytical abilities, and technological achievements—is what enables him to assert his unexceptional status. Confusion over the question “What is a woman?” has generated headlines in recent years, but it is the result of deeper confusion over the question “What does it mean to be human?” The answer seems to be: “We don’t know whether it means anything at all. Man is a directionless clump of animated cells, drifting through time and space.”

The disenchantment of human nature has ­many causes and takes many forms. Georg Lukács’s concept of reification points to some of them. The industrialized society and the bureaucratized state treat people as commodities, interchangeable with one another, lacking intrinsic value as individual persons. Industrialization detached labor from community significance. But blaming ­industrial capitalism alone is tendentious Marxism. The ideologies of the left have also played a role. The sexual revolution, that progressive watershed, has arguably done more than anything to turn people into things. And pornography, the most consistent iteration of the logic of the revolution, makes sex into a commodity, turning the actors on the screen into objects for consumers.

Then there is the transformation of abortion from an evil into a regrettable necessity and then into a right to be celebrated. Society’s moral imagination has been shaped by the logic of the sexual revolution, in which children are deemed accidental to sex; the humanity of the child in the womb has thus been stripped of its mysterious personhood. Much the same is accomplished by reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy. Though these phenomena witness to the good, indeed very human, desire to have children, they also propose children as things, as consumer items made to order, not begotten in mystery. Motherhood too is transformed, with egg donation and surrogacy turning women into service providers or reproductive machines.

Recent reports that the United Kingdom is on the verge of being able to manufacture sperms and eggs in the laboratory are a harbinger of what is to come. Gene editing, embryo screening, and the commercialization of fertility all tend to the disenchantment and commodification of human life. The term “designer babies” reflects a plausible concept. Human beings, once begotten through the sexual union of two persons, are set to become consumer products. Persons have become things.

The third element of our culture of dehumanization is that of disembodiment. Radical feminism since de Beauvoir has tended to treat women’s bodies and procreative functions as problems that must be solved if sexual equality is to be achieved. This has been reinforced by technologies that subvert natural bodily ends, treating them as bugs rather than features. The body is a hindrance to liberation of the self.

Disembodiment is not restricted to sexual matters. The more our interactions are mediated by technology, whether Uber apps or social media sites, the less important our bodies become. Never in human history has life required less actual, physical, interpersonal engagement. The ascendancy of chatbots, AI, and robotics will only compound this. I can order a meal, ride in a taxi, even have a romantic conversation without ever having to engage another person.

The convenience hides the cost. George Orwell once sent an angry note to a publisher, denouncing Stephen Spender for his homosexuality. Eight months later, he wrote to Spender to apologize. Spender wondered what had led to this change of heart. The answer was that in the interim, Orwell had encountered Spender in person. He explained:

Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realise immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas.

Meeting Spender in real life humanized him. He became a person, not simply an idea. We might add that it also humanized Orwell. Bodily interaction is key here: Looking into the eyes of another person involves a degree of communion; it reveals that person as a human being, such as we are ourselves. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, to borrow biblical language.

Today social media have universalized disembodied social interaction and perhaps made it normative for interpersonal engagement. Disembodied interaction often reduces interlocutors to the sum of the opinions they express and thereby turns them from real persons into aggregates of ideological fragments. No wonder social media can prove to be a cesspool.

The consequences are not restricted to social media. Part of what makes surrogacy plausible is the assumption that the experience of pregnancy is of little importance to the relationship of mother and child—that the maternal bond occurs postpartum. One might object that adoption assumes the same, but the cases are not parallel. In adoption, a couple takes the place of biological parents who should be there but for some reason are not. It presents itself not as a normative model for parenting, but as compensation for a privation. Surrogacy introduces a new model of what a parent is—a model in which gestation is accidental. And it reinforces the transformation of the body into a commodity.

The transgender issue is also pertinent, given that it involves a psychologized view of identity that marginalizes the sexed nature of the body and also the belief that bodies are simply raw material. Such ideas are plausible partly because of the way in which society’s intuitions about embodiment have been shaped by technology.

And then, once again, there is pornography. I noted above its role in disenchanting human nature. It also serves to disembody it—perhaps a counter-intuitive claim, given the central role of bodies in pornography. But pornography separates sex from relationships, indeed from physical contact with another person. Consumers enjoy that quintessentially embodied form of human behavior in a manner that detaches them from any of the ordinary concomitants of sex, from personal hygiene to the effort involved in romantic relationships, not to mention marriage.

Pornography also points to the fourth element of the modern assault on human nature: Human nature has been desecrated. Sex has ­historically been regarded as having sacred connotations. The Torah deals with sexual matters in terms of cleanness and uncleanness. The Qur’an prescribes postcoital washings. Paul in the New Testament sees sex as a matter of great importance, such that a man’s use of a prostitute involves a fundamental disruption of his humanity and his relationship to the church. To consider sex sacred makes sense, for in creating new life, it is the act that makes humans most like God. The sexual revolution did not simply make sex into recreation; it stripped it, and therefore the human nature of which it is a central part, of its sacredness.

The concept of desecration helps to clarify the delight some people take in the dismantling, disenchanting, and disembodiment of human nature, which those categories in themselves cannot explain. To wish abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare” is to hold a disenchanted view of human nature. But to glory in it as a “reproductive right” bespeaks an exhilaration that only transgression can deliver. Current pro-abortion politics are the politics of transgression, specifically the transgression of what was once considered sacred.

The same applies to death. Cultures have ­typically surrounded the end of life, no less than its beginning, with sacred significance. The Torah’s approach to sex and cleanness has parallels in its regulation of the treatment of dead bodies. Even today, our laws against the abuse of corpses often use the language of desecration. And yet western societies are making great efforts to transform death from a mystery into a medical procedure—a procedure that governs not just late-stage terminal illness but old age in general, depression, indeed any condition that can be presented as burdensome to the individual, the family, or even the state.

Human nature has been demolished, disenchanted, disembodied, and desecrated. The results are the cause of much of the moral chaos that characterizes contemporary Western societies. The Psalmist’s question “What is man?” was originally meant to express wonder at his undeserved status before God. In our mouths, it expresses our nothingness.

This brings us to the continuity between orthodox Christians and cultural Christians: a shared desire to respond to the chaos on the basis of a ­stable anthropology, a retrieval of what it means to be human. How can this be done? The question is difficult, because of at least two challenges, which I note here merely as matter for future discussion. First, there is the fact that, whatever its theoretical origins in nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought, as a practical matter the abolition of man has been accomplished by means of technological developments on which we all now depend. The concept of human nature has become negotiable because it seems inseparable from, and largely subject to, the technologies by which we relate to the world and to each other. Nor can we simply withdraw from this technological context. Modern-day anchorites might call us to do so, but it is worth remembering that Simon Stylites could stand at the top of his pole only because other, lesser mortals produced and supplied the food that kept him alive. We must find ways to recover human nature that do not present an unrealistic romanticism as normative for the majority of people.

Second, there is the fact that a lack of social consensus on the existence of God, let alone on religious dogma and practice, precludes consensus on any view of human nature grounded in the divine image. This lack of consensus is a problem, since the response to the desecration of human nature must be its consecration, and consecration must occur in a religious context. Given the secularity of our contemporary context, Christians must be modest about what we can achieve.

Nonetheless, some progress can be made on the first three elements of the anthropological crisis. The Christian distinction between natural and supernatural ends is helpful here. The two cannot be absolutely separated in Christian theology, but evidence suggests that on at least some natural ends, consensus between the religious and the nonreligious can be reached. The revival of interest in religion among intellectuals, even where it is pragmatic rather than dogmatic, witnesses to a shared intuition that our cultural problems arise from anthropological confusion. That fact should encourage us. It may not amount to a return to Christian civilization, if ever there truly was such a thing. But it may mark an era in which discussion of a new humanism can be pursued by both the religious and the nonreligious.

It is no surprise to Christians that attempts to deny human nature end up either in confusion or subject to a dialectical transformation into the opposite of what was intended. Those confusions and transformations are visible to many secular thinkers, too. Therefore, pointing out the failure of secular policies to deliver on their promises is useful in building a humanist alliance and in putting anti-humanists on the defensive. Such immanent critique is a way of making space for genuine dialogue and constructive policy formulation.

Transgender ideology is a good example. At its heart lies an obvious contradiction: It authorizes disembodiment in its denial of the relevance of sexed physiology to gender identity; yet it insists on the transformation of the body, if an individual is to be authentically who he or she really is. The body is simultaneously of no importance and of overwhelming importance. Further, allowing psychological states to determine identity risks incoherence. Why cannot a man be a wolf, for example, if he is convinced that that is what he is? Yet can a human being self-consciously be a wolf, when one attribute of wolfness is unconsciousness of one’s wolfish essence?

The trans issue also exacerbates a strange contradiction within the culture of death. In at least two cases in Canada, depressed individuals have been refused medically assisted deaths after having undergone gender transition surgery. The surgeries had left these individuals in physical and mental pain, but their requests for medically assisted death were refused. We thus note the contradiction generated by progressivism’s commitment both to trans ideology and assisted suicide, for to grant medically assisted death in these cases would be to acknowledge that gender transition does not always resolve gender dysphoria. It would seem that in our progressive Animal Farm, some causes of suffering are more equal than others.

The issue of biological men competing in women’s sports has gripped the public imagination, since its focus on fairness circumvents the issue that makes trans ideology plausible to so many: its foundation in psychologized selfhood and happiness. The sports issue thus offers the opportunity for highlighting the importance of embodiment. Which is more plausible—the prose of a Judith ­Butler, the libertarianism of the ACLU, or that picture of Riley Gaines standing on a podium beside a man posing as a woman? The case for a new humanism is there made incarnate.

The transgender issue is connected to IVF. President Trump’s actions regarding transgenderism are most welcome, but his promotion of IVF suggests that these policies are not driven by a coherent anthropology. The Trump administration is not wrestling with the broader question: What status should we grant biological limitations in an era of Promethean technology?  Disappointing as the inconsistency is, it offers a chance for serious discussion about why these policy decisions are inconsistent.

The sexual revolution is also ripe for critique. Its intention was to liberate, but it has ended up turning everyone into objects. Easy access to the pill was sold as good news for women, but men have gained, too, from the promiscuity it enabled. And, despite the claims of some feminists, pornography is bad news for women, with its exploitative labor practices and transformation of the sexual expectations of its users.

Much of this has recently been pointed out by Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, writers who use secular arguments and evidence. Their work protests both the disembodiment of human nature and its disenchantment, seeing in the sexual revolution a prime example of promises betrayed and humans dehumanized. Likewise, when Jonathan Haidt warns of the effects of social media on young people, he speaks not in religious terms, but from an understanding that human nature is not infinitely pliable. There is the work of David Berlinski, an avowedly secular thinker. There is support across traditional political divides for anti-pornography initiatives. Many parents are becoming skeptical of the role of screens and smartphones in the lives of children. Combine these developments with the renewed interest among intellectuals in Christianity and its cultural influence, and the moment may have arrived for a new humanism. We need not wait for consensus on religious premises before starting these discussions. We need only point to the internal contradictions and the catastrophic consequences of our modern anti-humanist ways.

None of this is to say that a new humanism will certainly emerge in this earthly city. We may not win the day, and one who puts on his armor should not boast as one who takes it off. But there are signs that the anti-humanism of our age is overreaching by pressing the dismantling, disenchantment, and disembodiment of human nature to extremes. ­Many are realizing that we can fight human nature for only so long. It remains to be seen whether we will self-destruct or a new consensus on what it means to be human will shape our political discourse, our social policies, and our communities. The struggle for our cultural and political future is not best understood as a struggle between right and left, conservative and progressive, but as one between humanists and anti-humanists. And given the lateness of the day, I submit that the hour for advocating a new humanism is upon us.

This essay was delivered as the 2025 D.C. Lecture.

The post Toward a New Humanism appeared first on First Things.

John Lennon was an artist. And like any good artist—I use the term loosely—he sensed Something Big coming in advance. Then he captured it in a single, 1968 track of music: “Revolution 9,” eight and a half minutes of incoherent noise.

More on that in a moment. But first, a golden oldie.

I arrived as a Notre Dame freshman in the fall of 1966. My graduating cohort (1970) was the university’s penultimate all-male class. St. Mary’s College, an excellent all-female institution, sat directly across the road. The schools shared, and still share, the city of South Bend. Today South Bend is a pleasant, mid-size urban center. Back then, it was where hope went to die. Winters were soul-crippling and endless. Notre Dame men outnumbered St. Mary’s women four to one. Which meant that underclassmen could kiss feminine companionship goodbye and enjoy a months-long, deep-dish helping of Arctic despair—in the Indiana dark. Come the fertility of spring, this could have interesting tribal results.

Consider the following from Anthropic’s helpful AI assistant, Claude:

On April 16, 1967, 1,500 Notre Dame students initiated a panty raid on the students of Saint Mary’s College. Cries of “We want panties” and “Go Irish” erupted as bra bandits ran across Saint Mary’s campus, collecting undergarments thrown from the windows of dorms. During the madness, one Saint Mary’s student asked someone why he wanted her panties. The answer: “Hell, because they’re there!” . . . South Bend Police pretended to give a hoot by blaring their sirens as the girls threw underwear out the windows. 

As it happened, the “raid” was entirely innocent. It was—dare one even think it today?—fun. I know because I was there. More importantly, so was my future wife, later the mother of our four children and a career Catholic educator. She was one of the (many) women gleefully tossing their underwear out the windows of Holy Cross Hall.

Sharing the story above triggers two standard responses. The first is predictable. It’s a lecture on sexism from the gender police. The second is far more interesting. It’s the amused (or bored, or uncomfortable) look on many young adult faces when I tell it. Why a raid? Why the drama? Why storm the Bastille for something as available and casual as sex?  

They’re logical questions. For the young, the past is a distant continent. Nostalgia comes naturally with age, and it can be both pathetic and dangerous. The mid-1960s were far from the “good old days.” They had their own ugly list of tensions, including a war in Vietnam, the civil rights struggle, and fraying relations between the sexes. Yet they were also the still relatively sane top of a very steep slalom into the world we’ve since created. And it can be tempting to long for a do-over; a chance to rewind history and avoid the crater of social unrest and broken relationships at the bottom of the slope. Which is where we find ourselves now.

Alas, here’s the bad news: In the real world, rewinds and do-overs don’t happen. But there’s also good news: Course corrections can happen. And in Victims of the Revolution, Nathanael Blake does two important things to that end, with convincing skill. He explains in persuasive detail how the sexual revolution of the late twentieth century “liberated” millions of people to be miserable, in bed and out. And he offers a path forward with strong reasons for hope.

Victims is a simple book in the best sense: concise, vividly written, and tightly argued; backed by solid research, and powered by common sense. Adjectives of praise are cheap, but Blake—a scholar with the Ethics and Public Policy Center (and a colleague of this reviewer)—has produced something genuinely crucial to understanding our current cultural turmoil. He notes that the sexual revolution was intended as a healthy overthrow of repressive, bourgeois sex attitudes and a hollow respectability in matters related to eros. Instead, it “produced a multitude of hypocrisies and cruelties of its own,” without healing “the ills of the old order nearly as well as its proponents hoped.”  

Early in his text, Blake sets the theme of his argument: Contrary to its own sales pitch, “liberated” sexuality

produces unhappiness because it is inimical to relationships and practices that offer us profound meaning and joy in life. Deep relationships require deep commitments, but sexual liberation requires that every romantic relationship (and therefore every parental relationship) be severable. Thus the sexual revolution doubly cheats its disciples. Not only does its ethos of pursuing immediate pleasure injure the commitment that is needed for lasting and fulfilling relationships, but it also provides far less sexual gratification than promised.

To put it another way, there’s an elegance, delight, patience, and fertility to the dance of a lasting romantic relationship. These things depend on self-giving and restraint. And they all get jackhammered by a culture of serial orgasms with multiple partners. Two exquisite ironies flow therefrom. Married couples, especially if they’re religiously active, typically enjoy a high degree of sexual happiness. Meanwhile, many “liberated” young adults live a very real-world version of “Revolution 9,” struggling with anger, depression, moral incoherence, and online pornography, and a significant decline in actual sexual relations relative to previous generations.  

There’s much more. For Blake, “violence [is] inherent in the sexual revolution,” most obviously in its dependence on abortion as an alleged guarantee of female equality and liberty. But even more striking, as he notes in his chapter on “The Abolition of Man and Woman,” is the way the sexual revolution has, inevitably, morphed into gender anarchy. What began as a hymn to the free pleasures of the body has become an assault on the meaning and dignity of the body. The result is not just an affirmation of homosexuality, but a transsexual license for self-mutilation.

In Blake’s words: “Treating the body as clay to be remade at will is the consummation of the sexual revolution’s stripping the body of all intrinsic significance, leaving only that which is subjectively asserted.” And both the gay and trans movements are expert in using emotional blackmail—an inflated threat of suicides—to educate or coerce critics into silence.

In spite of today’s challenges, Blake’s book is very far from an exercise in pessimism. It’s the opposite. His concluding chapter amounts to a call for renewed Christian realism about the world, with the power of the gospel as the soil of a compelling hope. As he argues throughout his text,

The overwhelming triumph of the sexual revolution is creating the conditions in which Christian sexual morality will once again appear protective and merciful. . . . In a sexual world (mis)ruled by the tyranny of desire, the Christian view of sex as a self-giving act of love looks pretty good, and the restraints around it appear as necessary protections for that love to flourish.  

For Blake, the Christian who trusts in the Lord will find signs of hope and renewal even amid decline, “as the failures of the world fertilize the fields of future evangelism.” And what he says so well is true. But of course, the work of seeding and harvesting the field belongs to us.

The post Course-Correcting the Sexual Revolution appeared first on First Things.

The depth of Robinson’s involvement in this highly sexualized subculture is not clear, but two things appear to be true. First, Robinson watched porn, and if he was accessing “furry” content, likely a lot of it. Second, Robinson, who was raised in a conservative home, was in a relationship with a transgendered man, and his murder of Kirk was partially motivated by the latter’s advocacy against trans ideology. 

Some might see two unconnected things: a pornography habit, and a violent commitment to gender fluidity. But there is compelling evidence that the second is downstream of the first. 

Many people still have trouble conceptualizing the unique pathologies of modern digital pornography. For those who grew up with Playboy magazine, the word “porn” may still connote hard-to-get photographs of beautiful women, cheerfully showing off their bodies alongside banal content like political columns or movie reviews. The porn user of yesteryear could give himself to lust, but only after age and money enabled it, and even then, most were obliged to keep one foot in reality given the trappings of physical media.

Internet pornography is to Playboy magazine what fentanyl is to whiskey. The world of online porn, the world that Robinson and hundreds of millions of his peers have inherited, is a world bereft of the limitations and tethers of the last century. Children routinely access it. Smartphones keep it near users at all times. Curated genres and “communities” guarantee that no fantasy is too brutal or degrading that it can’t be found.

Digital pornography has been a key feature of internet culture for decades, in ways that are more relevant to social and political life than many appreciate. Through the early 2010s, the microblogging platform Tumblr was a massively popular place for two particular things: fan fiction and pornography. Tumblr users could use pornographic content as a prop in their own digital fantasies, fantasies often expressed in forums dedicated to anonymous role-playing (much like the “furry” content that Robinson consumed). 

This powerful blend of the pornographic and the fantastical made Tumblr one of the earliest hubs of transgender narratives. This wasn’t an accident. Both Tumblr’s form (an open-ended forum for personal, anonymous narrative) and content (pornography and fantasy) made it a plausibility structure for gender ideology. As one piece published in the journal Feminist Media Studies puts it: 

Tumblr supported trans experiences by enabling users to change over time within a network of similar others, separate from their network of existing connections, and to embody (in a digital space) identities that would eventually become material. Further, before 2018 policy changes banning “adult” content, Tumblr upheld policies and an economic model that allowed erotic content needed for intersectional trans community building.

Pornography is a hallucinogen. It reframes human sexuality in utterly unreal ways. Characters in pornographic content portray sex the way Harry Potter portrays magic: as something that can happen for anyone, at any time, to any degree imaginable. For young men in particular, this narrative of sex cultivates a deeply dissonant conception of personhood and intimacy, one that is constantly confused and frustrated by real life. Pornography and sex are not the same thing; in fact, they are very nearly the opposite. As the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han observed in The Agony of Eros, “What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.” 

All of this makes pornography one of the chief ingredients for various self-destructive ideologies, including transgenderism and political violence. As the pornography user surrenders to the world of unmoored fantasy more and more, other aspects of life follow. While much pornographic content is violent, the fact remains that even nonviolent smut deadens the conscience and makes aggression more plausible. According to one study, porn addiction is more closely associated with intimate partner violence than even alcoholism or drug addiction. 

The details of Robinson’s life are still sparse, and we should be very cautious about parading the biography of a political assassin, lest such fame prove inspirational to others. Yet this is another jarring reminder that pornography is one of the worst and least-addressed cultural crises of the last fifty years. It almost certainly played a crucial role in giving Robinson both the motivation and willingness to murder Charlie Kirk. And it continues trapping millions of people into patterns of dark delusion. Our society’s lament of violence and alienation rings hollow as long as we continue to wink at one of their chief exporters.

Image by Mario Yaír TS, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped,

The post Tyler Robinson and the Violence of Porn appeared first on First Things.