Sexual Libertarianism: Can it Deliver the Goods?

 Western culture is sex-addicted. Perhaps instead, it is addicted to the idea of maximizing sexual pleasure by removing any limitations or taboos. When actress Kristen Davis was asked about her role in Sex and the City, she commented that the purpose of the show was to “demystify the whole sexual thing,” making it as normal as eating a Big Mac.

Another indication of the Western thrust towards the demystification of sex comes from the universities, where sex is given center-stage. In 2012, Harvard extended official recognition to a new student group – Harvard College Munch:

• Munch is not about midnight snacks. It is a coy term for kinky sex, principally…bondage…and sado-masochism. (Salvo, Spring 2013, 11).

The group’s founder explained, “It’s tying people up, telling them to do stuff, and hitting them with things.” One Harvard female undergrad explained to the student newspaper, “I like being told that I’m a slut or good for nothing but sex” (11).

Ironically, at the same time, so many university campuses are trying to ban Christian groups. In contrast, these groups promote a much higher view of humanity – that we’re good for far more than sex. However, Western culture’s vision and commitment is for normalizing and promoting all forms of sexual gratification, even if it is degrading and imposes tremendous personal costs.

However, does sexual libertarianism (SL) lead to sexual gratification? Well, it must! Why else would it be promoted so vigorously?

However, there are sound reasons to question that SL can deliver the goods. Robin Phillips cites research showing that “people who have the most sex, the best sex and are the happiest about their sex lives are monogamous, married, religious people”:

• Women without religious affiliation were the least likely to report always having an orgasm with their primary partner – only one in five … Protestant women who reported always having an orgasm [had] the highest [percentage], at nearly one-third. In general, having a religious affiliation was associated with higher rates of orgasm for women. (The Social Organization of Sexuality, 115; quoted by Salvo, Spring 2013, 35)

This is consistent with previous studies. A Redbook Magazine survey of 1970 found that:

• The more religious a woman is, the more likely she is “to be orgasmic almost every time she engages in sex.” Conversely, irreligious women tended to be the least satisfied with the quality and quantity of their intercourse. (35)

Phillips cites two other studies that were consistent with these findings. Many have speculated about these surprising findings. To explain them, some have cited the negative costs of the demystification of sex, while others have associated casual sex with violating the moral standards of the participants, even when they denied having them, thereby depriving them of sexual fulfillment. Writing for USA Today, William R. Mattox:

• Suggested that “church ladies tend to be free from the guilt associated with violating one’s own sexual standards” – a factor that a University of Connecticut study found to hinder sexual satisfaction among unmarried college students. (36)

Meanwhile, others suggest that over-exposure can lead to apathy. Phillips cites a 16-year-old who confessed, “I’m so used to it, it makes me sick.”

C.S. Lewis adds an important piece to the puzzle, reflecting the words of Jesus (Mat. 6:33):

• Look for yourself [and your own fulfillment], and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look to Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. (Mere Christianity; cited by Phillips, 37)

Far from being a cosmic kill-joy, the Bible gives us a portrait of a God who understands what we need and gives us the necessary guidelines to satisfy these needs. After all, He created us and truly loves us!

Cosmic Fairy Tales: Who are the True Believers?

Several times a week, I am accused of believing in fairy tales, because I believe in a God who created the entire universe. In contrast, my detractors believe that everything came about naturally, even before there was even “natural” laws - natural causation. In other words, given enough time – and where did that come from? - the universe will jump into existence uncaused. And it must be uncaused, since there was nothing prior to the universe to cause it.

Well, which is the fairy tale – Intelligent Design (ID) or a non-existent naturalism? Perhaps I seem to unfairly be stacking the deck against naturalism, even from the get-go, but I really don’t want to do that. I’d prefer that rationality carry-the-day rather than an alleged misrepresentation of naturalism.

So let’s do this – Let’s look at different features in our universe and see if we can determine which belief system better accounts for them. However, I won’t cite those features that IDers always cite – the fine-tuning of the universe, the elegance and immutability of our laws of science, and the origins of life, the cell, and DNA - to slam-dunk the ID case. Instead, let’s set our sites on something much closer – on the human being.

While many of our characteristics enable us to survive and pass on our genes, we have many other characteristics that seem to transcend this narrow struggle for survival. There are characteristics that seem to merely enrich life and to not aid in procreation. These, therefore, would be difficult to account for from an evolutionary/naturalistic perspective:

Music Appreciation: We not only enjoy music but are often elevated by it. Although a naturalistic explanation can be forced to account for such a trait, it could just as easily be argued that music might take the human being away from his more primary task of survival.

In addition to this, it is often noted that our appreciation of music is strongly associated with precise and elegant mathematical relationships between the notes and chords, suggesting a transcendent design. It is almost as if God had been saying, “I want to share with you something that delights Me!”

Visual Aesthetics Appreciation: How can naturalism explain our appreciation of the visual world? As with our enjoyment of music, this seems to be a gratuitous add-on, a survival non-essential, something that might simply take our attention away from killing a monkey to feed our family. From a Biblical point of view, we were created, not only to survive, but to partake in something higher – God Himself.

Sense of Humor: This sense delights in the paradoxes of life - the things that don’t fit neatly together and perhaps should. This too seems like a distraction from the all-important struggle to survive and procreation. However, it clearly is another gracious add-on – a survival non-essential.

Contemplation and Consciousness: This allows us to become self-aware. While many regard our higher thinking as a bane, something that can render us inactive and morbidly self-conscious in a world where we need to be very active to survive and to pass on our genes, there is also little doubt that contemplation enriches and deepens our lives. It offers us the potential to be truly human.

Nor does this mental work simply concern catching more food. It pursues moral, legal, and epistemological questions.

Moral Sensitivity: Also consistent with the ID paradigm of being created in the image of God, all humanity has sexual taboos. We do not (or should not) sex mother and father, brother and sister, son and daughter. The evolutionist might argue that these taboos served to preserve the genetic integrity of the tribe by limiting the spread of genetic defects. However, a stronger case could be made that inbreeding, such as we find among animals, can maximize the linkage among beneficial genes – a possible aid to evolution.

Also, from an evolutionary point of view, taboos minimize the availability of reproductive partners.

Monogamy: Instead, we find monogamy deeply entrenched in human society. This is an institution that minimizes the ability of the “fittest” from passing on their genes, thereby slowing the engine of evolution.

Similarly, we restrict the “fittest” from passing on their “desirable” genes through our human taboo against rape and the dominant, fittest male controlling all of the females. Besides, why should evolution implant within us a sense of guilt regarding those behaviors – rape and selfishly creating a harem for ones exclusive pleasures – which promote evolution!

Instead, sexual faithfulness is extolled, and this is consistent with the nature of our moral God and the fact that we alone are created in His image.

Altruism: Our God is altruistic. He sacrificed Himself for us, and we are like Him in this sense. Consequently, those who are most admired are not those who pass on their seed with greater frequency but those who think of others first. However, altruism seems to run counter to the evolutionary paradigm. It puts others’ needs before our own to pass on our “superior” seed. It puts sharing above controlling.

Meaning and Purpose: An animal’s purpose is to control scarce resources, whether sexual or material. However, it is a well-accepted fact that humans require a higher moral purpose in life, something that transcends reproductive pursuits. Such an esoteric concern will necessarily detract from attention to survival and reproduction. How then can we explain the basic human need if it not only lacks survival value but actually militates against reproductive fecundity?

However, the Bible provides a perfect explanation for this trait. We have been so designed so that we will not be totally consumed with the material cares of life and will seek after ultimate truth.

Lack of Ultimate Fulfillment: As successful as we might become in our corner of the world, we never find ultimate satisfaction here. We always have a longing for something else – the property of the Transcendent. Why this oddity, this distraction, this restless longing? This trait often leads people into the contemplative life – into the monk’s life – and away from maximizing genetic exchange. Of what procreative value could this reality possibly contain?

Instead, this trait is easily explained from a Biblical perspective. We are simply not meant to be fulfilled here. Our hope is to be invested in the return of our Savior and in His future kingdom.

Deterioration of the Human Genome: If we were ideally created, as the Bible maintains, ID would predict de-evolution - the increasing accumulation of genetic defects, and this is just what we find.

I think that all of these human considerations/realities are better explained by ID than by a naturalistic hypothesis. And which human traits cannot be explained by ID? Which aren’t congruent with the ID hypothesis? I don’t see any.

If these considerations are so, then who is it that believes in fairy tales?

Richard Dawkins, Atheism and Sexual Faithfulness

Can we be good without God? Certainly not sexually!

Richard Dawkins has been termed “the world’s most famous atheist.” He also insists that we don’t need God to be good. However, he makes some interesting admissions:

• Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place? The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?   

• And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom. (Banishing the Green eyed Monster)

What does Dawkins admit? He admits that monogamous marriage is a matter of “property rights” and cheating is admirable. Of course, this must also include lying. If you’re a cheat, you must also be a good liar:

• Bill Clinton was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about it. But he was entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so

If cheating requires a “positive duty” to lie in order to cover it up, perhaps that says something about the nature of cheating. If a couple can’t handle the truth that one party is cheating, perhaps self-control is more in order. And perhaps true love requires faithfulness!

However, Dawkins might be right that the cheater can’t be honest about the cheating. His partner might not be able to handle it. When I returned to college, I wanted to try what had become a rage – a sensitivity (therapy) group. I wanted to stay close to “home,” so I decided to join a group sponsored through the United Campus Ministry. However, before long, it became apparent that the “minister” was putting-the-make on two attractive females in the group. They confronted him about this, and he responded that he and his wife had an “open marriage.”

However, he later admitted that they had to carry out this “openness” in secret. Once he came home early to find his wife entering their home with her cheating-prey. The minister admitted that this sight so disturbed him that he had to be committed to the mental hospital for two weeks.

However, these are precisely the “free spirits” that Dawkins “admires.” But are they really free spirits? Is it freedom to jump from a 12-story building or to drink lye? Dawkins think so and therefore rhetorically asks,

• Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?

There seems to be many good reasons – mental breakdown, divorce, disease, damage to children and even to society. John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) wrote of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

Why wasn’t Dawkins cognizant of the various costs of “open” marriages? Perhaps his own lusts clouded his thinking. However, it seems that this has clouded the thinking of many non-theists.

Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, president of the World Federation for Mental Health, had stated in 1945:

• The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking with faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.

• The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.

• If the race is to be free from the crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

How widespread was this thinking “In a 1976 survey of members of the APA, 95% reportedly admitted to being atheists or agnostics.” Were these philosophical commitments the product of evidence or lifestyle choices? According to Al Parides, Prof. of Psychiatry, UCLA:

• If you look at the personal lives of all Freud’s followers—his initial disciples—these people certainly have an unbelievable amount of particular problems in the sexual area…The amount of deviancy as far as their sexual behavior and so forth is enormous. If you are saying that psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior—yes, I would agree. (Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal, Bruce Wiseman, 12-14)

Perhaps God is necessary for the well-being of the family!

Monogamy and the Success of Western Civilization

The West has historically favored the monogamous family structure and has thrived as long as it retained its traditional values.

According to Karla Dial, a new multidisciplinary studypublished in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a team of authors working in the fields of anthropology, economics and psychology:

• Though polygamy has existed throughout history — and is still accepted in some pockets of the world — it doesn’t benefit children, women, individuals or cultures the way married monogamous relationships do. According to the study, monogamy yields four primary benefits:

• It reduces crime. Numerous studies show that when they’re married, men are 35 percent less likely to commit crimes, and 50 percent less likely to commit violent crimes. The same cannot be said of polygamous cultures — or countries where men outnumber women. In China, for example, the overall crime rate doubled between 1988 and 2004 as the number of males outpaced that of females.

• Monogamy leads to gender equality. In monogamous societies, women are generally considered equal partners in the relationship. But as the number of wives grows, the power of each in the relationship decreases.

• Monogamy reduces household conflict. Research shows children raised in polygamous homes face far less household stability — and more conflict and violence — than those raised in monogamous relationships. As one author pointed out, “living in the same household with genetically unrelated adults [not counting adoption] is the single biggest risk factor for abuse, neglect and homicide of children.”

• Monogamy improves children’s well-being through greater paternal investment. The more wives and children a man has, the less time he has available to spend with each of them. Even though men in modern polygamous societies tend to be wealthier, their children suffer from poorer nutrition and lower survival rates than those in monogamous households. 

More recently, the has-been affluent West has flirted with alternative family configurations. However, this flirtation was been strongly associated with many social ills, negatively impacting even the welfare and performance of children.

Ironically, those who are blowing the whistle against legitimizing alternative configurations are demonized as “bigots,” and “hate-mongers.” Is there any way to express our concerns without being “tarred and feathered,” even by those institutions that are supposed to safeguard the free and responsible exchange of ideas?