The biological urges driving young people in particular but people in general toward extracurricular sexual activity are so strong that any relaxation of the moral and social barriers against such activity will have a predictable result. In our society, with marriage delayed, sexuality pervasive in our culture, the economic and social penalties for premarital sex drastically reduced, parents less concerned, and colleges no longer acting to keep the sexes apart, nature is taking its course.
At NRO, David French worries that the high degree of sexual activity among evangelical youth is part of a broader process of creeping moral laxity among American Christians. There is a lot of evidence pointing in this direction; in my youth divorced people could not remarry in an Episcopal church. It is hard to think of anything you can’t do in an Episcopal church these days and other denominations seem to be drifting down the same gentle slope. (It is, one must note, odd that the fewer moral demands a church places on its members, the fewer people bother to come. Many of the relaxations in moral discipline were intended to make the church more ‘relevant’: that judgment looks pretty stupid today.)
Yet in other ways, Christians along with other Americans are becoming less tolerant of ethical flaws. Casual and brutal racism was once so deeply woven into American life that you had to be a great moral hero to fight it. We are less tolerant of those who want to pollute the rivers and the air in the search for private gain. The vice of smoking was once tolerated; among adults there is much less toleration for drunkenness (especially in business and professional settings) than there used to be.
1. A common thread in all this is that people struggle hardest against those vices which they perceive do the most harm. Parents may want their children to be morally excellent in every way, but they are realistic enough to know that you must choose your battles. Fifty years ago smoking was believed to cost money and stain your teeth; now that we know how deadly it is, parents care more.
This will sound like heresy to many optimistic Americans, but at Via Meadia we sometimes wonder whether people make any moral progress at all. Americans are less racist than we used to be, thankfully, but we are much less committed to our marriage vows. We drink to excess less than Americans did before the temperance movement arose to combat the public drunkenness of the 1830s and 1840s, but we take many more dangerous drugs. We have abolished political and economic discrimination against women, but it is much more socially acceptable than it used to be for a prosperous, middle aged man to ditch the mother of his children, leave her in poor economic condiitons, and to take up with a much younger woman and start a new family. Our ancestors would have thought that an unspeakable crime, and would be horrified that we tolerate that behavior so widely today. Islam, I note, at least demands that plural wives be treated equally. Is serial monogamy involving casting off the old wife like a dirty pair of socks really morally superior to egalitarian polygamy?
Changing fashions in morals often reflect prudential calculations; smoking is seen as more dangerous than it used to be, and premarital sex as less destructive. We focus more on preventing the one than we used to, and pay less attention to the second.
This is not hypocritical or even immoral; all vice by its nature is bad for you, but it is best to struggle hardest against the vices that do the most harm. Prudence is also a virtue and has its proper place in human struggles to live better lives.
The difficulty when it comes to premarital sex is that any separation of sexual conduct from marriage inevitably weakens the family — the primary and foundational institution of society. That damage is not obvious and overwhelming; it is gradual and subtle, but it is real. A hook up culture in college is not the best foundation for faithful monogamy later, especially when so many young people now grow up in what used to be called broken homes.
The defense of the family is one of the most important priorities before American society today, but most of the would-be defenders approach the issue superficially. The most dangerous attack on the family has nothing to do with extramarital sex.
125 years ago when most Americans still lived and worked on farms, the family was a unit of production. Parents were partners in the fullest sense of the word: they worked together to put food on the table as well as to raise the kids. Kids helped out around the farm with chores and as they grew up took on more and more responsibilities in the family business until the time came for them to launch a new partnership on their own.
Today’s American family is quite different. Mom and Dad usually work in different jobs far from homes; they get in their cars and drive off. Home is a place where people spend money and enjoy leisure time; the family bonds around the TV rather than in the corn field. Both parents have work friends who their spouses know only slightly if at all; they outsource much of the work of raising and teaching their kids to schools.
The bonds between the members of these units tend to be weaker than the bonds on the farm where the parents and children worked together as a team to keep each other clothed and fed. If we are serious about strengthening the America family, and I think we should be, we will have to think much more deeply about how our society works.
Defending the American family and laying the foundation for strong homes in the 21st century is a much bigger project than worrying about extramarital sex or, for that matter, gay marriage. Evangelicals and other Christians who want to play a role in the revitalization and protection of the family need to get away from a “moral panic” agenda and begin to analyze the ways our current social and economic order weakens and impoverishes family life. Then comes the hard work of figuring out how to fix what has gone wrong. There is a lot of work to be done.