Sex & The Final Christian Generation. By Rod Dreher.
Curious to know more, I bought and read historian Kyle Harper’s 2013 book about how the advent of Christianity caused a sexual revolution in Rome of late antiquity.
In Rome (the term I will use to describe the entire Empire), sex was seen as something very different than how even post-Christian morality sees it today. Harper says that sexual acts were judged solely as a matter of “social reproduction” — that is, affirming and reproducing the social order. That was an order that gave maximum privilege to freeborn Roman men; freeborn Roman women, though, were strictly confined to matron status. Freeborn men were entitled to have sex with unmarried women not of their social class, and also with men — but they were strictly forbidden from being the passive partner in gay sex. (Indeed, the word “gay” is inappropriate here, as male sexual desire was considered to be fluid; you were not thought to be exclusively homosexual just because you enjoyed sex with males.)
The fundamental principle governing sex acts was that “a sexual act was composed of an active and a passive partner, and masculinity required the insertive role.” Sex with boys and girls was considered normal. Slaves and prostitutes were treated as subhuman under Roman law and custom, and were the sexual playthings of free Roman men.
It is hard to overstate the mass suffering this social order caused. Writes Harper:
“Slave ownership was not just the preserve of such super-rich aristocrats, though; the sheer extent of slave owning meant that the mechanics of Roman sexuality were shaped by the presence of unfree bodies across the social spectrum. One in ten families in the empire owned slaves; the number in the towns was probably twice that. The ubiquity of slaves meant pervasive sexual availability. “If your loins are swollen, and there’s some homeborn slave boy or girl around where you can quickly stick it, would you rather burst with tension? Not I — I like an easy lay.” Slaves played something like the part that masturbation has played in most cultures …”
Nobody cared about slaves and prostitutes. They were non-persons. But their presence in society was absolutely required to maintain the social order. …
Sexual exploitation was at the basis of the entire Roman order. …
“Women are prostituted in brothels, selling the violation of their flesh for pleasure, and boys are led to reject their nature, taking on the role of women.”…
“No matter what any moralist said, “the whores are proof of what is actually done.” Indulgence was not a matter of abuse or excess; it was embedded in the order of society. “The wise men of the laws allow this. They let them sin with the protection of law. They call unspeakable acts of pleasure contentment.”
“In Alexandria Clement had a disturbing front-row seat to the most brutal machinery of the Roman sexual economy. He could watch the giant slave ships at dock, bringing “fornication like wine or grain,” selling girls wholesale to procurers throughout the empire. Sexual moralism inspires Clement’s discomfort, but he is one of the most striking observers of the realities of the Roman slave trade. The sale of sex was anything but marginal. “The whole earth is filled with fornication and disorder.” …
“Fornication was not just a word; it was a worldview, in which the cosmos, the order of civilized life, appeared to be in the grip of sin.” …
Harper writes with banked horror at the enormity of prostitution in Rome, and its connection to the slave trade, and to Roman economic life. Sex trafficking, as we would call it today, was a fundamental part of Roman social and economic life. The historian’s tone is even throughout the book, but he is at his most passionate imagining the immense suffering of countless enslaved women and girls, compelled to service Roman men, even to the point where, in the words of one observer of the era, the exhausted women looked like corpses.
Is there any wonder why Christian sexual morality was greeted by the poor as liberation? …
Christianity’s conception of sex and eros, an essentially Hebraic one, was radically different, and opposed to Rome’s. For St. Paul and the early Christians, sex was bounded by gender. It cannot be overstated how much they despised homosexuality. …
The severity of early Christian writing on sex had a lot to do with the fact that the apostles needed to convince the tiny new religious community to keep itself separated from the corrupt majority culture. After Christianity became the religion of Late Empire, the tone would moderate somewhat. …
The Romans might well have asked the same question as our modern post-Christians: Why does the Church care so much about sex? The answer then, as now, is: Because the way we exercise eros has everything to do with how we regard the human person, and even cosmic reality. …
Early Christian teaching did not come out of hating the body, but from regarding it as holy. …
In fact, the Romans cared greatly about sex too, because it is impossible not to. Sexual desire is a fundamental part of being human, and as Freud taught us, civilization requires governing chaotic sexual desire….
Abortion is such an intensely charged issue in our society because the entire Sexual Revolution, and the sexual liberty of the individual, depends on easy contraception and the widespread availability of abortion. The orthodox Christian today regards the abortion industry with the same horror that Christian of the early church regarded sex slavery: as a sign of the rot at the heart of the social system, and its core disregard for the sanctity of individual human life.
This is a point that must be emphasized strongly: in the early church as in the contemporary church, Christian sexual morality is not primarily a matter of grumpy killjoys trying to keep everybody from having fun (though surely that sort of person existed); rather, it is a matter of respecting and defending the dignity of each individual, who is made in the image of God. The early church lived and moved in a world built economically and otherwise on sexual exploitation by the powerful few (all adult males) of the powerless many. … The model of sexuality that succeeded the Christian model has proved to be great for strong men, but terrible for women, children, and men who are lower on the male hierarchy, for reasons of looks, money, or what have you. …
There’s no doubt that St. Paul and the other early Christian leaders were very severe in their sexual moralizing. Harper wants us to understand, though, that this puritanism didn’t come from nowhere:
“It would be hard to overestimate the extent to which Christian sexual moralizing, in its first three centuries, was shaped by the boundary between the righteousness of the Christian community and the seething depravity of the vast outside world.” …
Harper’s description of how the Empire changed its sexual morals once it became Christian is fascinating. The overcorrection to Roman vice was severe. Christians today should not imagine that post-pagan Rome became as proper as, say, Victorian London. For example, in 390, the Christian emperor cleaned out the male brothels and ordered the prostitutes burned alive in public. The world of Christian-inspired sexual laws were more just than what had existed before, but they were still very harsh by modern standards, having more in common with a modern Islamic fundamentalist society than with what we have today.
The sexual revolutionaries are returning towards pre-Christian times:
In our own time, the people who care the most about sex are not Christians, but the new sexual revolutionaries — people who, for example, fill elementary school classroom bulletin boards with LGBT propaganda. …
One of the main lessons I took from reading Harper is that it is impossible to conceive of a social order in which sex, and the management of sexual desire by law and custom, is not at or near the center. Our post-Christian culture is an intensely eroticized society, one that can fairly be called pagan, I believe, though it’s a Christianized paganism in that it rejects the patriarchy of Rome, and defends the right of men and women, rich and poor, to defile themselves as their desires lead them. Our sexual revolutionaries have jettisoned Christian sexual mores, but have retained its universality of human dignity. Or in this case, indignity. In any case, when you hear sexual revolutionaries of the Left caterwauling about how they can’t understand why mean old Christians care so much about sex, realize that it is they who are sexually obsessed. You know the dishonest dialogue we have today:
SexRev: “Gay, gay, gay. Gay! Lesbian. Lesbian. Lesbianlesbianlesbian. Bisexual, trans, demisexual, trans, pansexual, trans, polyamorous, trans, trans, trans, trans, TRANS! TRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANS!”
Christian: “Gay? Trans?”
SexRev: “Bigot! Why are you so obsessed by what people do with their bodies?!” …
Sexual morality is so fundamental to Christian social teaching that contemporary Christians who have cast it aside to assimilate to the post-Christian world’s model can hardly be said to be authentically Christian. …
There is a reason why when Christians give up Christian sexual morality, they sooner or later give up Christianity. The Biblical rules of Christian sexual conduct are inextricably rooted in a particular vision of what the human person is, under God, and how believers are supposed to treat the material world, their bodies (and the bodies of others) first of all.
Whatever the German Catholic and Anglican bishops think, it is not possible to reconcile contemporary sexual morality, including homosexuality, with Christianity. It simply cannot be done. Those who believe it can are lying to themselves. …
Reading Harper’s book brought home for me how fluid erotic desire is, and how it will inevitably be channeled by bounds set by law and custom. There never has been a sexual paradise, and never will be. Every society has to figure out how to govern sexual desire, which is immensely powerful. When directed properly, it is generative in many ways. But when it is ungoverned, it is profoundly destructive. Go visit the ghettos in any major American if you want an example.
As shocking as we find Roman pederasty, we are fools if we don’t recognize that it is coming back right under our noses. It started in the schools, with LGBT activists pretending to want to create “safe spaces” to fight bullying. Now we see schools, as well as the news and entertainment media, promoting the sexualization of children with widespread and open propaganda around gender ideology. Drag Queen Story Hour is part of this campaign. …
Christians today and blind, because they are unaware of the sexual environment that gave rise to Christianity:
What Christians (and others) have to understand is that we are contending against zealots of a new religion. They are teaching us, and our children, to worship strange new gods (or rather, familiar old gods in new form). And from what I can tell, the vast majority of Christian clergy and laity have no real idea what’s going on, and are scarcely fighting back. …
Among us Christians, the harvest of willful denial and cowardice, both clerical and lay, will be bitter indeed. We lack all conviction, but the zealots of the new gods are filled with passionate intensity.
