{"id":67831,"date":"2018-02-02T08:00:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-02T13:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67831"},"modified":"2018-02-02T06:17:37","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T11:17:37","slug":"1st-things-mary-eberstadt-the-zealous-faith-of-secularism-how-the-sexual-revolution-became-a-dogma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67831","title":{"rendered":"(1st Things) Mary Eberstadt&#8211;The Zealous Faith of Secularism: How the Sexual Revolution became a dogma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If the so-called right to choose were truly an exercise of choice\u2014if the rhetoric of the people who defend it matched the reality of what they actually believe\u2014one would expect its defenders to honor choosing against it here or there. But this does not happen: No \u201cpro-choice\u201d group holds up as an example any woman who chooses not to abort.<\/p>\n<p>That this doesn\u2019t happen tells us something noteworthy. For secularist believers, abortion is not in fact a mere \u201cchoice,\u201d as their value-free, consumerist rhetoric frames it. No, abortion is sacrosanct. It is a communal rite\u2014one through which many enter their new religion in the first place. The popular, Internet-driven rage for \u201ctelling one\u2019s own abortion story\u201d\u2014the phenomenon known as #shoutyourabortion\u2014illustrates this point. Each individual story is a secularist pilgrim\u2019s progress into a new faith whose community is united by this bloody rite of passage. Add the suggestively popular term \u201cwoke\u201d\u2014today\u2019s gnostic version of \u201cawakened\u201d\u2014and there\u2019s more evidence that secularist progressivism has erected a church.<\/p>\n<p>So the fury directed at Christianity can be pressed into a single word,\u00a0<em>sex<\/em>. Christianity today, like Christianity past and Christianity to come, contends with many enemies. But the adversary now inflicting maximal damage on the Church is not dreamed of in Horatio\u2019s philosophy. It is instead the absolutist defense of the sexual revolution by\u00a0<em>its<\/em>\u00a0faithful.<\/p>\n<p>Christians and other dissidents aren\u2019t being heckled from Hollywood to Capitol Hill for feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, or defending the commandments against lying and stealing. Bakers aren\u2019t landing in court because of trying to follow what\u2019s said in the Song of Songs. All of the expressions of animosity now aimed against Christianity by this new secularist faith share a common denominator. They are rooted in secularist dogma about the sexual revolution, according to which that revolution is an unequivocal and fundamental boon.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/article\/2018\/01\/the-zealous-faith-of-secularism\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If the so-called right to choose were truly an exercise of choice\u2014if the rhetoric of the people who defend it matched the reality of what they actually believe\u2014one would expect its defenders to honor choosing against it here or there.<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=67831\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,168,133,155,129,108,95,424,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-history","category-other-faiths","category-psychology","category-religion-culture","category-science-technology","category-secularism","category-sexuality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=67831"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67833,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67831\/revisions\/67833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=67831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=67831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=67831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}