What is clear from the study are the increasingly entrenched perspectives of two Americas: A growing secular America champions an unburdened sexual libertinism whose version of sexuality is freed from the constraints of traditional sexual morality, a morality that often issued from religious-based truth claims. Meanwhile, religious conservatives in America remain quite skeptical about the general population’s enthusiasm for throwing off supposedly outmoded notions of sexuality.
But another narrative of America’s religious landscape is also clear from the survey””one that Russell Moore and I wrote about at National Review discussing preliminary statistics that sociologist Mark Regnerus described at a spring conference of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. What we said then remains important: Evangelical Christians aren’t liberalizing on the issues of sexual morality.
I think Americans may not realise how strange much of the rest of the world finds their preoccupation with sex. All every TV programme obsesses about being “hot”, and I think the division of the two American perspectives is less interesting than the fact that both have such an unhealthy focus on one part of life.
In much of the rest of the world “true love” is not about finding your soulmate … but about the life you build together. In our church family we celebrate the 50th and 60th wedding anniversary more fulsomely than the 1st. Somehow I can’t imagine Americans seeing Romeo and Juliette with wrinkles like that, but perhaps I am wrong.
Every time I think about it I remember the CS Lewis quote:
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You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act-that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?
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When I lived overseas, MargaretG, I was distressed to find that non-Americans think we really behave like our awful TV programs and movies. We’re not that bad (yet), honest.