The Grand Coherence, Chapter 13. The Case for Chastity

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.

No time to read? Try listening instead: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11Q449zLJ1_XDtptNL9GlNBSBFYqxwBVu/view?usp=drivesdk

It's not too late to skip ahead to chapter 14! This is the chapter that strays furthest from the central argument of the book, and which is least essential to its overarching mission of establishing the grand coherence of the truth. I can vouch for the severability of the rest of the book from this chapter. If you skip, the argument will still make sense. If you're reading this book a few decades hence, when, with luck, the Sexual Revolution will have passed away and will be remembered as an extraordinary temporary darkening of the human mind, like communism, then the argumentation in this chapter for what will again have become normal and obvious truth, will be rather superfluous, and of mainly historical interest, like the epitaph on a tomb of a tyrant. But at the moment, the foul-tasting medicine this chapter offers, alongside some more wholesome food, is extremely necessary to restoring the health of our ailing civilization.

In the last chapter, we developed a method of reasoning about sexual ethics by applying the Golden Rule in light of the insights of sociobiology. We applied it to a few light examples, and found that it gave us plenty to say, without really settling anything. But when I turn to the real rules of Christian sexual ethics, the firm exhortations and the stern prohibitions, something astonishing happens. Mainstream culture takes for granted that they are irrational taboos, and even most Christians seem to regard them as mysteries about which the intellect must simply submit to revelation because reason is helpless to provide any warrant for them. But I find the opposite. The arguments, once set in motion, proceed as easily as falling dominoes, and lead precisely to all the traditional rules of Christian sexual ethics. Then, once you've seen why the rules make sense, you can't unsee it. I've almost lost the ability to imagine why anyone doubted them.

It seems downright providential that such powerful argumentative ammunition has fallen into our hands just in the nick of time. Darwinism, the single most important cause of the West's intellectual irreligion, turns out to thoroughly refute the rather juvenile notions of innocent sexual spontaneity that reign in the modern West. Darwinism shows why sexual instincts are such powerful, pervasive, and potentially destructive influences on people's moods, motivations, and character. It shows why they are capable of providing great fulfillment and happiness, but also terribly prone to lead to violence, exploitation, treachery, depression, and negligent upbringing of children, unless they are held strongly in check by social norms and personal willpower. In fact, Darwinism provides a basis for stronger, clearer, and subtler arguments in favor of the whole array of old Christian sexual rules than have ever been available in the past. My task in this chapter turns out to be easy, because Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins and other theorists of evolution have done nine-tenths of the work for me.

Once you understand the ramifications of Darwinism for sexual ethics, it becomes clear why the Sexual Revolution was a mistake, why it sowed the seeds of so much heartbreak and misery, and why we should unlearn all its lessons and restore chastity and family values. And Christianity's teachings on sexual ethics, far from being a liability, are a great piece of evidence in favor of the truth of its larger claims. Christianity solved one of the great riddles of human existence, then kept its head about it when everyone else is continually losing theirs. It is sane about a subject that always makes men mad, wise about a subject that always makes fools of them. Doesn't that prove that it's divinely wise? Isn't there something supernatural about the way, at its touch, a terrible tiger became a beautiful and gentle workhorse?

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

I'd better start a very unpleasant topic indeed, which even C.S. Lewis usually wrote about only obliquely or symbolically. I feel the need to apologize for talking about masturbation directly and openly. But the internet, with its easy abundance of pornography, has made it such a terrible problem that I think it needs to be faced head-on, even though it's yucky to talk about. And the argument here is good training for the rest of the arguments we'll be making, since much of the reasoning cross-applies.

Why are masturbation and pornography morally wrong? Do they hurt anyone? Sure they do. Masturbation is a solitary act, but others are affected too. At a minimum, time spent masturbating to pornography is time not spent serving others, directly or indirectly. But it goes beyond that. 

Masturbation is almost always treated as a shameful secret. To admit to it evokes disgust. Secrets are inconvenient. Certain innocent questions about what you were doing at time X have to be ducked or dodged or evoke blatant lies. Living spaces need to be arranged to provide a certain kind of privacy. Porn addicts tend to become socially withdrawn and shy, unable to engage with pleasure in spontaneous conversation. It’s naive to think that a masturbation habit that takes relatively little time is nearly costless. As one loud, off-key singer can ruin a choir, or a few strokes of graffiti can go far towards spoiling the beauty of a great painting, so a daily masturbation and porn habit alter the whole flavor of life and character of a person, always for the worse.

The sociobiology of masturbation would seem at first glance to be rather mysterious. Why would the selfish genes put up with it? They want us to procreate. Using the sex organs for masturbation defeats that purpose by channeling sexual energy and desire in an irrelevant direction. But the selfish genes operate at a subrational level, working crudely with mere sensory data. They can’t engage with our actual knowledge of our actions and their consequences. There are birds who will sit on any egg-like object in their nests, even if it’s much too big to be one of their eggs; the larger, the better. Cows’ milk is diverted to human use because cows’ bodies, when milked by human hands, think they’re feeding calves and respond by producing more milk. Likewise, pornographic images and masturbatory movements trick the selfish genes into thinking that they’re hitting the reproductive jackpot. A common result for men, according to many, many recovering porn addicts, is an inability to make love to real women, as the body becomes rewired to perceive sexual opportunity in sexy images with which real female bodies cannot compete. As porn addiction escalates, it takes more to enable addicts to get off, and they tend to be driven to different and more disturbing genres. No wonder they become withdrawn, with minds haunted more and more by images that decent people would regard with disgust and horror. With thoughts that must not be spoken aloud, what have they left to say?

That’s not what men were made for. God made the human race in His own image, to reason and know, and to enjoy and rule all creation, and most of what we like to do grows out of that divine mandate. Gardening, singing, dancing, hiking, building and all manner of work, caring for pets, looking after and teaching our children, helping our neighbors, talking and reasoning and studying— all these activities honor the divine image. They are consistent with the human vocation, even if in our fallen state we can’t do them well or in right measure. Many of our impulses and instincts are good. In making love, too, to our spouses, for procreation or even simply the expression of love, we honor the divine image in ourselves, for while God does not have sex, He does create and love. Still more does sexuality enhance our humanity when our sexual instincts are sublimated into virtues calculated to please the opposite sex. A man is often brave to impress a lady. A lady often makes herself beautiful, or better yet, is kind and patient and pure, in order to please men. But in masturbation and pornography, we depart from the human vocation. We become, to use a word that has intense rhetorical force even if we hardly know what it means, subhuman, the pawns of our lowest instincts and chemical addictions.

What does the Golden Rule say about this? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Would you want others to masturbate more, or less? Or not at all? Perhaps some would attempt to say that they want others to let off steam or have a good time, or that they don’t care and it’s none of their business. Such sophistries are easy to say, and might help to dodge an unwelcome moral conclusion. But the wiser and truer answer is revealed in the disgust we all experience on witnessing any act of masturbation, a disgust so obvious and nonnegotiable that public masturbation is practically unheard of even in the most insistently “liberated” and “sex-positive” subcultures. Of course we don’t want our neighbor to masturbate, because it’s an utterly selfish and useless action, which wastes the scarce resources not only of time, but of imagination, sexual potency and desire, interest in life, openness and honesty. It is, if anything, more selfish than any other act except suicide. Even if our neighbor is only going to please himself, let him do it in any other way, in a way we can watch and talk about and learn from! We might get some vicarious pleasure, and some good ideas, from watching him enjoy a great feast or drink a fine wine, drive a splendid car or live in a gorgeous mansion, and if he dresses in magnificent clothing, he may please our eyes as much as he appeases his own vanity. But masturbation takes the best out of us, and gives nothing back.

There is an interesting contrast between the privacy of marriage and the privacy of masturbation. Married couples don’t want to be seen copulating. They don’t talk about copulating in public either. Yet it’s very far from being a secret. In traditional cultures, and to a large extent even today, a wedding is the most public event of most people’s lives, the time when the largest crowd is assembled to see them. And everyone knows what will happen on the wedding night. Nothing could be less qualified to serve as hot gossip than “Mr. and Mrs. Smith had sex!” Well, duh. Of course they did. But people don’t just not want to be seen masturbating, they don’t want it to be known that they masturbate. To be called a great lover is a compliment of sorts, though not suitable for all ears or contexts; but to be called a great wanker is about as shameful an insult as can be conceived. The mingled privacy and publicity of marriage is a fascinating mystery, but the intense privacy of masturbation is a confession of guilt. Every act of masturbation steals from one’s fellow men, and mars and defiles life. There is no excuse for it at all. It has no place in the good life for man. This is an enemy to which we must give no quarter. It must be purged utterly, and then, if possible, forgotten.

Masturbation, for the man or woman who has become its prey, is the most pervasive of temptations. For other sins, the motive and/or the opportunity is rare. Most of us rarely if ever have people we want dead. Even if we do, people can defend themselves, and murders get investigated. Most married men most of the time have no opportunity to commit adultery. But masturbation is available whenever you're alone. Other sins try to tempt us by wearing masks of good. Murder calls itself justice. Adultery calls itself love. Greed calls itself prudence. But masturbation cannot pretend to any kind of goodness. It says instead that no one will know, that it will take only a little time, and that resistance is futile because you know will give in in the end. An addict of porn and masturbation who lives alone or works a solitary office job faces a vast, bleak expanse of hours every day when porn is just a few clicks away, masturbation just a few tugs, and nothing else seems to satisfy. He can say no a hundred times and the agony of willpower must still go on, for what seems like forever. 

There are tricks. Leave your office door open. Take a walk. It's very, very hard. But it's not impossible. And the fight is worth it. Masturbation is a dark, strangling tunnel of despair. It is a zero-sum game played against life. Defeat it, and you can take an interest in things at a whole new level. You can be open and honest all the time, not lying, not hiding and sneaking like a sewer rat. You can look back with healthy disgust and easy superiority on the old obsessions to which you were once wretchedly enslaved, when you think about them at all, which you hardly ever will. 

Premarital sex, more precisely described by the fiercely moralistic word “fornication,” is as alluring to most of us, or to most men at least, as masturbation is disgusting. I have read writers that try to inculcate attitudes of spontaneous disgust at unmarried people having sex. Good luck with that! I won’t attempt it here. Any man (women are a bit different) so pure-minded as not to feel temptation at certain thoughts and images is above needing advice from me.

Nonetheless, fornication is wrong, and we can see why by combining selfish genes sociobiology with the Golden Rule. Fornication can be like masturbation, a shameful and secretive addiction. But the far commoner problem is a kind of exploitation, whereby the selfish genes of lovers play ruthless games at each other's expense, while the conscious minds of the lovers, acting as pawns of the selfish genes, feel alternately romantic, bored and heartbroken through successive infatuations, seductions and betrayals, leading to wasted years and ruined lives.

Sex with “no strings attached” is by nature extremely appealing to men, much less so or not at all to women. If he only consulted his raw preferences, and not his reason or moral principles, a man would probably have sex with most women at any opportunity. That's certainly what evolutionary psychology suggests, and men will tend to confirm it, as, I think, do some experiments which I'm reluctant to cite since they're ethically questionable, and lots of literary evidence. 

For women, sex naturally creates a sense of attachment and belonging, and a desire for an ongoing relationship, if it didn't exist before, though it probably did, since otherwise she wouldn't have consented to sex. Sex can make a man more eager to leave. He's done what he came for and wants to get free before she finds a way to tie him down. Hit and run. For a woman, even in the rare case where she didn't feel much attachment or forward-looking interest before, sex will create a sense of attachment that may take her by surprise. Her selfish genes know that she might be pregnant, and if so, she'll need a man's help to raise the baby, and the father is by far the most promising candidate to provide it. So her instincts say: Hold onto him! The selfish genes will give her these instincts even if she knows, e.g., based on contraceptive use and a pregnancy test just to be sure, that she isn't pregnant.

These highly asymmetric and powerful instincts must be taken into account when we think about the meaning of “consent” in sexual acts. Mainstream society now holds that premarital sex is fine, legally and morally, if only a woman consents. But what does she consent to? To be seduced and abandoned? Or to the formation of a sexual relationship continuing into the future, perhaps indefinitely? What were her expectations? What were her hopes? If she had expectations, what did he do to encourage them? Did he make any promises, perhaps some that he has forgotten? Did he flatter her along the path to seduction, in ways that gave her expectations warrant? And how can he even remember? 

Lovers in the bedroom are characteristically, and in a way ought to be, too excited to be accountable for their words. “Pillow talk,” as the old phrase puts it, is naturally spontaneous and irresponsible, a kind of verbal foreplay, springing from instinct to heighten enjoyment. It's well worth enjoying, but shouldn't be taken seriously, as if it were written by lawyers negotiating a contract. Yet it has to be, if the permissibility of every sexual act depends on consent. The recent “campus rape crisis” is revealing, for it has shown that some young women feel strongly that they have been raped, after sexual acts to which they consented hastily, rashly, or under some sort of merely social or emotional pressure that was not physical coercion, perhaps while intoxicated. This seems irrational, but sociobiology gives some justification for these feelings, for it shows that a man who has sex with a woman without marrying her damages her, burdening her with unfulfilled feelings of attachment to him, and lessening the value instinctively placed on her by other men and even by her own parents and other kin, and above all by herself. In older times, the law did not place quite so much weight on consent. Rape was a more serious offense than mere fornication, but fornication was still illegal. But we are concerned here with questions not of law but of ethics. How should the Golden Rule be applied to fornication?

A naive application of the Golden Rule to fornication would be that if A, a man, wants to have sex with B, a woman, A “does unto others as he would have them do unto him” by seducing her. This is mistaken because sex has a different meaning for him and for her. The question isn't whether he would like to have sex with her, but whether if he were a woman, he would like to be seduced and abandoned by a man like himself, with all that entails, from possibilities of pregnancy, to unfulfilled feelings of attachment, to the need to keep a guilty secret from parents and friends and maybe a future husband, to damaged marital prospects, etc. Probably not.  Her consent is certainly not sufficient evidence in favor. For one thing, he cannot know what hopes, expectations and desires she may harbor of attaching him to herself permanently. If she wants him to marry her, she might not tell him, to avoid scaring him away. For another, it's quite likely that she may be blinded by sexual passion into making decisions she'll regret. That happens all the time. There are really no cases when he can be justifiably confident that she is acting in her own best interests by fornicating with him, and therefore, that he is not violating the Golden Rule by seducing her. The only ethically safe thing for a man to do is to refrain altogether from having sex with unmarried women.

For a woman, the application of the Golden Rule is quite different: it is not the harms to the man she should worry about, but to the many others who have a stake in her. Fornication probably won't hurt him much, except in a moral sense. He'll enjoy himself, and feel very pleased with himself, and might brag to his friends, and feel more confident with other women. A string of sexual conquests can spoil a man and turn him into an arrogant jerk, but never mind. That shouldn't be her main concern. A man who's trying to seduce her without marriage isn't worthy of her sympathy. Instead, let her think of more deserving people, such as the parents who raised her, siblings and friends who are close to her and love her, teachers and pastors and anyone who has been kind to her and invested in her throughout her life. What would they think? 

Modern society would tend to say it's none of their business. Yes, it is. We ought to be grateful to our benefactors and, all else equal, do what would please them. People who “pay it forward” by investing in the younger generation, feeding them, and teaching them, have a right to expect that those young people try to live up to expectations as far as conscience permits. Until the past couple of generations, few women could doubt that all who have loved and invested in them throughout their lives would desire intensely and unambivalently that they remain chaste until marriage. Now it's a bit more complicated, because some of those who invested in her may buy into the fashionable ideology that fornication is no one else's business, and would try to suppress their natural aversion to seeing their darling girl slipping into some stranger's bed. Even so, if she asks which course of action, chastity or fornication, would be more conducive to the peace of mind of all those to whom she owes a debt of gratitude, she can't really be in any doubt about it, even in a contemporary social context. No one feels an instinctive aversion to chastity in young women. 

Another group for whose sake a young woman should stay chaste is all those young men who might court her with honorable intentions in the future. Wouldn't they be disappointed if, having fallen in love with her, they find out about some past lover who had her before? The revelation may drive away future suitors, which is one reason why fornication is imprudent for women: it damages her marriage prospects. Yes, it's safe to assume that's so even today, for men's instinctive preference for virgins is rooted in the selfish genes and can't be erased by political correctness. A young woman may feel that she's sacrificing herself to her lover, damaging her own prospects to satisfy his suffering desire or her own, but that she has a right to do so, for it’s her own prospects that she is sacrificing, and future suitors have a right to walk away if they don't like it. That misses the point that she impoverishes them all when there is one less virgin bride on whom they can set their hopes. And if they set their hopes on her and then find out, it's hardly a sufficient consolation that they're not bound, but are free to give her up. Then again, perhaps she won't tell them, and they'll find out later, and feel who knows how much torment of retrospective jealousy. Maybe they'll feel she cheated them. Maybe they'll tell her about it, or even leave her because of it. Maybe they'll suffer in secret. Or maybe she will confess her past to a future suitor, or he'll find out some other way, and he'll marry her anyway. How much regret, or guilt, will she feel that she could not give herself to him pure? How much will it spoil his delight in her love? Or maybe her future husband will never find out, and she'll carry the guilty secret in her heart for decades, to haunt her in precious moments, and reduce what she has to give him. Maybe he'll guess. Maybe she'll never know whether he guessed or not. What a price!

More important, if anything, are the interests of her future children, starting with the children that might come from the act of fornication itself. It's a cruel fact of life that a household headed by a single mother is not a very viable economic unit. Child care is naturally a full time job. Earning a living takes most people one-third of their waking hours or more. So a single mother is likely to be poor and/or dependent on public assistance or private charity throughout her child's youth, unable to purchase extra services that could help her child have fun or get ahead. Worse than the lack of money will be the lack of her own attention that she can devote to the child. Worse still, perhaps, may be the lack of social status. Our society, to its credit, has suppressed the open scorn for “bastards” that was so common in the past. Yet the fact remains that one of the most salient facts about any child is who their parents are, and a child that has no contact with his or her father will have to report this troubling fact in response to innocent questions again and again, probably feeling a little shame every time, and probably making the questioner secretly and vaguely feel that this child is from a troubled background and probably won't amount to much in life. Statistically, poverty and broken homes are major determinants of life outcomes, with the children of poor backgrounds and single mothers being more likely to be poor, commit crimes, do drugs, and get pregnant out of wedlock, and much less likely to go to college. 

Deprivation of a father also harms children because they instinctively want to know their fathers. There are two sociobiological reasons for this: first, the father is a likely source of help in childhood; but also, the father is a mature expression of many of the child's genes, and therefore an imprecise but useful prophecy of the child's future. “Like father, like son,” as the saying goes, and this is true for reasons of both nature and nurture. A child raised with limited or no contact with its father will miss the nurture pathway, but mere genetics will create powerful resemblances, so naturally children should be curious about what their fathers are like, as a glimpse of what they themselves will be like. That's useful, for one thing, because one can plan or prepare based on one's future traits. The special kind of love between parents and children and the special value of knowing one's parents or one's children are such that every child has a right to know his or her mother and father, and to try to secure this right as widely as possible is one of the most important duties that society has. It's not feasible to secure it for everyone, just as it's not feasible to completely secure the right to life by preventing all murders, but society must try. Why was slavery such a terrible evil that it was right for the United States to fight a terrible war to end it? One of the most important reasons was that slavery often resulted in the forcible separation of families, when a husband or wife or father or mother or child was sold. Modern artificial insemination, similarly, is wrong because it results in children not knowing their biological fathers, and adoption, though not wrong in general, is only justified in tragic cases where it is not feasible for a child to be raised by its parents. One reason why fornication is wrong is that it often results in children being raised without their fathers, or worse, aborted, that is, murdered in the womb. 

But even if a woman doesn't get pregnant by fornication, her future children are likely to be harmed. Her past will be either a guilty secret from them or a bad example. Children naturally want to know their parents’ backstories. As they encounter the chances and changes of life, they look to their parents for voices of experience, and ask, “What did you do about this?” They'll probably want to know, for example, whether their father was the first man their mother was with, and vice versa. A mother who has to admit that she committed fornication will tend to lose authority to urge her daughters to remain pure. The exception that proves the rule is that a mother who has thoroughly repented of her past fornication, who has changed her life and ceased to be the sort of person who would do that, may offer as edifying and persuasive an exhortation to chastity as a mother who has practiced strict chastity all her life. But she can do so only by denouncing her past self. And a mother who has kept this secret hitherto, perhaps even from the children's father, may be forced to choose whether or not to lie. For fornication is not the sort of secret that can be reliably kept in the long run without resorting to lies to protect it. Another reason why a woman who fornicates wrongs her unborn children is that they may have a different father, and probably a less valuable one, than if she had stayed chaste, since a sexual history generally damages a woman’s value and prospects in the marriage market. For the same reason, children she would have had may not be born at all. 

And the consequences don't stop even then. Her sons and daughters are likely to follow her bad example. Fornication can thus run in families. Most societies have some notion of honor or nobility that is related to the transmission of family tradition down the generations through honorable marriage. Christianity doesn't particularly encourage this kind of family pride. It insists that we are all related, fellow descendants of Adam and Eve, and there is in that enough honor to keep us hopeful and enough shame to keep us humble. Christianity is no “respecter of persons,” and for its own purposes treats the high born and the low born in just the same way. Still, people like to hoard their genealogies, and to be proud of their ancestors. Often the mere antiquity of an ancestor is a point of pride, even if he or she was undistinguished, but if you remember enough ancestors, at least some of them will probably have done something interesting. But in cultures that value family tradition, the chain of honorable marriage must be unbroken. Illegitimacy spoils it. One might as well stop tracing one's ancestry when it forces one to admit to that. 

It's counterintuitive for us to count the cost of the Sexual Revolution in the number of honorable lineages that it has extinguished through childlessness or illegitimacy. But it would have been natural for many past cultures to see our times that way. And we feel that loss too. Elderly people love to treasure their grandchildren, if they have them, and feel the lack, if they don't. And then there is the more complicated case where they have grandchildren by unmarried daughters, their upbringing difficult and their future doubtful, their very existence a reminder of shame. Or again, there are grandchildren by unmarried sons, whom one may not only scarcely see, but scarcely get to know secondhand, for even their father rarely sees them. Many of those of us who can do so without awkward revelations still like to talk about grandparents and great-grandparents, etc., their origins and their adventures. It's an innocent pleasure, and it's sad to be deprived of it by a checkered family history. It's fun to resemble one's ancestors. But one can't do it nearly so well if one is not enabled to do it by one's upbringing, and that's why family tradition and honorable marriage are connected, because marriage usually provides a fairly stable, loving environment, full of parent-child interaction and teaching and learning, where the transmission of family tradition can occur. Illegitimacy turns one's ancestors into strangers.

When a woman summons her willpower to resist a seducer, all that hangs in the balance. Her choice will echo down the generations and centuries, probably for good if she chooses right, almost surely for ill if she chooses wrong. The stakes are terribly, terribly high, so high as to beggar the imagination. That's why most societies have felt the urgency of educating young girls in the duty of chastity. The modern West has tried to deny it, to its terrible cost. 

Imagine a wealthy society with well-paved roads and lots of cars, but no traffic laws. Elites in this society insist that roads must be free by the loftiest principles of liberty, and any interference with what a driver does there is forbidden. They denounce the dark old days when tyrants presumed to set speed limits and erect stop signs, and solemnly vow “Never again.” They take very seriously the consuming passion of speed demons and racing in the street, and solemnly affirm their respect for this lifestyle choice or (by some accounts) innate identity, while quietly passing zoning laws that price demographics prone to racing in the street out of the neighborhoods where they live. When high speed racing bursts out in the street, they don't call the cops or even condemn it in newspapers or public speeches, though they do avoid the parts of town and times of day when it's most likely to occur. They learn to look the other way, unconcerned, when they pass flaming wrecked cars on the road. Freedom has its price. And they patiently pay their taxes to support all the cripples and orphans that the frequent car wrecks produce. Through it all, they pride themselves on being the enlightened society where juvenile joy riding is given its place in the sun, and the lifestyle choice of the speed demon is tolerated and respected like any other. 

Well, the West is that society, with the difference that it is with respect to sex rather than driving that we practice cruel and unreasonable tolerance. We ruthlessly leave people, even very young, inexperienced people, free to make terrible mistakes, and pay the life-shattering price, withholding even public warnings and official disapproval. Good advice about sex is a kind of heresy in some quarters, and must be given surreptitiously, and at some risk to the giver. Wiser, more practical societies, of which the history of Christendom affords many examples, did their best to prevent the life-shattering mistakes. In various ways, they managed space and kept eyes on people to make fornication physically difficult, and urged chastity in pious sermons from official pulpits and through blunt gossip in the kitchen and the street. The West should come to its senses one of these days, and find a way to enlist all sensible and mature people in a cunning, implacable conspiracy to protect young people from their selfish genes.

"Free love" is a powerful and alluring idea, and I have a feeling that some who are under its spell will be impatient with my argument so far. Can't we get past these old hangups? Do we really need to govern our sex lives in a manner shaped by instincts which, by my account, are adapted to the Stone Age? We have good contraceptives now, and an adoption system, and law and order, and gender equality, and a welfare state. Can't we leverage our modern advantages to get more sexual delight and adventure? Part of the answer is: no, we can't leave the old hangups behind, because they're hardwired into our genes. Ethics must deal with human nature as it is, not as we might wish it to be. But also, it would be worse if we could. To alter human nature to make it compatible with the Sexual Revolution would not make for a better world.

I've heard that our private relatives the bonobos live the peaceful, hedonistic promiscuity to which the Sexual Revolution has long aspired. Females have no inhibitions and mate freely. Males don't fight over them: there's plenty of access to go around. The ratio of sexual acts to pregnancies and births is huge. I'm not enough of a biologist to assess whether the characterization is accurate, and I don't need to. It strikes me as plausible and will do for a concept. Should we wish humans were like bonobos? Should we try to make them more like bonobos through some kind of social engineering? No doubt the notion would appeal to many.

But on second thought, the price is too high, for sex would cease to be significant and to create attachments. It would be like a kind of cooperative masturbation, mere selfish pleasure, transactional and empty. Maybe we can't feel quite the same spontaneous repugnance to such promiscuous sex as to masturbation, but we can ask whether it's worthwhile to spend so much time on an activity that creates nothing and isn't an expression of love. Inhibitions, attachments and jealousies turn sexual relationships into a real interweaving of life stories in self-giving love. That's what would be lost if we turned human beings into bonobos. If we should wish for a different human nature, we should wish for more monogamous instincts, so that we could achieve the mingling of lives in love and family formation without the distracting temptations. Such was human nature before the fall, according to Christianity (see Matthew 19:1-9). But such instincts would not have been adaptive in the Stone Age, and propensities for infidelity and polygamy would have conferred an advantage in genetic competition, and spread. That's the instincts that we need to overcome.

And that brings me, belatedly and inadequately, to a happier theme, Christian marriage, yet I foresee that I won't be able to do it justice, and will leave an unbalanced impression, emphasizing the dark side of sexuality more than its joyous and wondrous and blessed side, as Christian theologians and preachers have often done before. I once took a course on strawberry growing, and the instructor had much to say about soil preparation, weeding, watering and pest control, but only spoke for a few minutes about everyone's favorite part of the process, harvesting, for which he half-jokingly apologized. In a sense, strawberry harvesting is more important than mud and bugs and weeds. Yet the instructor’s emphasis was practical. Harvesting is easy. Managing the mud and bugs and weeds is the hard part, and if you do that right, delicious strawberries will probably follow. In the same way, this chapter, and to some extent the whole Christian tradition, has focused on the unpleasant work of warning and forbidding and disapproving, so that the garden of love may be fruitful. 

Happy marriage isn't as easy as harvesting strawberries, yet it really is outrageously easy compared to the happiness it gives, if you've had the sense, or the luck, to arrange things so that the selfish genes are working for you rather than against you. If rival love interests, past, present, and future, can somehow be taken completely off the table, kept out of sight and out of mind, then your selfish genes and your spouse's feel an almost perfect harmony of interests, so it becomes natural to love and serve each other wholeheartedly, and together to delight in and labor for any children you may have. 

In-laws are the one big difficulty. From the selfish genes’ perspective, he has his parents and siblings and nieces and nephews, and she has hers, and he wants to see and serve his, and she hers. Interests diverge. Be warned! And so the Bible teaches that “a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife.” That's not a hard and fast rule, just a casual generalization and a piece of good advice. Sometimes married children have to live with their parents in hard times, and that can be pleasant enough if everyone handles it gracefully. But it won't quite come naturally. The ideal is for each married couple, with any young children, to have their own house.         

Happily married people share everything and enjoy each other's company and serve each other every day, usually without even needing to try very hard, year after year, decade after decade, as fashions and corporations and war and peace and booms and depressions come and go around them. A license to make love as much as you like, in complete innocence, is sweet, splendid, exquisite, and delightful. One never quite gets over being amazed by that privilege. And yet it's only the cherry on top. It's not sensual pleasure but a special harmony of instincts, often called "love" in one special sense of that word, which includes sexual desire but casts its spell over the whole of life, that is the greatest solid good that sexuality confers on those who find their way to faithful, monogamous, lifelong marriage. 

As the old Christian phrase puts it, a husband and wife are “one flesh,” and I think evolutionary psychology sheds a brilliant new light on the meaning of that phrase, without reducing the mysterious and sacramental character of Christian marriage. For as a unity of genetic interests makes the parts of your own body spontaneously cooperate, so the unity of genetic interests between husband and wife makes them spontaneously cooperate, with a naturalness and grace and pleasure that mere friends could hardly hope to achieve if they dedicated themselves to the perfection of their friendship for a lifetime. Other collective lifestyles, such as those of a monastery or an army, tend to be very regimented, because there is no natural harmony of instincts among the members, so rigid rules are needed to make them cooperate. Marriage, by comparison, is remarkably free and spontaneous. If strict, inviolable rules of sexual exclusivity and permanence are in place, instincts do much of the remaining work. The moral will must be hard at work, too, of course, and marriage and especially parenthood requires daily self-sacrifice, but it’s not hard to get into a groove where that comes naturally and feels good. When big decisions need to be made, couples should talk it over and decide together, but if they can’t come to agreement, Christianity has a solution to that as well: “A husband is the head of his wife, as Christ is the head and Savior of the Church” (Ephesians 5:23). In marriage, the man ultimately has the casting vote, but the price is that he especially must sacrifice himself for his wife at need, even to the point of death if it came to that.

And faithful, monogamous, lifelong marriage is a Christian discovery! Or at least, if many had enjoyed it before, only Christianity institutionalized it. Today, likewise, while many enjoy faithful, monogamous, lifelong marriage, only Christianity resolutely upholds and guards it. All societies seem to have had marriage, in the sense of a publicly acknowledged relationship binding a woman to a man, such that sex can occur between them without dishonor to the woman. But pre-Christian societies didn't require monogamy and sexual fidelity from married men. Most societies have allowed polygamy, and while the ancient Greeks and Romans did practice monogamy in the sense of permitting men only one official wife -- and I suspect this is a major reason why they achieved so much -- they regarded prostitution, and the sexual utilization of female slaves (I.e., rape, from a modern, and truer, perspective, but they didn't think of it like that) as normal and acceptable. Christianity confirmed, and confirms, men's insistent feelings of ownership in their wives’ bodies, but makes it reciprocal, and the husband must regard his body as belonging to his wife, not to be lent to another woman. Today, secular people take monogamy, and usually also the expectation of mutual sexual fidelity, for granted, but they have no authority from which to derive a strong condemnation of divorce, so modern secular marriage has become, so to speak, an “at will” affair, without the sacred “one flesh” unity of Christian marriage.

About children, the modern West is neutral. A few worriers about overpopulation would discourage childbearing, but most secular Westerners would leave it to married couples’ preferences to procreate or not. By contrast, Christian churches tend to make it at least a soft obligation for married couples to have children if they can. They say marriages should be "open to children," and some discourage or forbid the use of contraception. Why?

First, a married couple has two people, so if there's a decision to be made about whether to have children or not, how is it to be made? There can be no majority vote in a society of two. Should the husband decide? The wife? Or do both have a veto? If it's a choice, it's likely that the default will be to have no kids, and a spouse desirous of children will yield for the sake of peace. But we know from evolutionary psychology that the instinct to procreate is very fundamental, and to sacrifice that is likely to lead to lifelong regret. Christianity thinks a spouse should not impose childlessness on a spouse. 

Second, children benefit from the gift of existence, don't they? Married couples have the chance to confer that benefit. Shouldn't they do so? And yet if we follow this logic all the way, we would conclude everyone ought to have as many children as they can, that human life may abound. That seems too extreme. Maybe a good compromise is to forbid contraception, so that married people don't have to maximize reproduction, but their means to limit it require more self-restraint than most will exercise, so the interest of potential children in getting the gift of existence will be reasonably well served. But Christians differ about that, so it's not my business to insist on it in a general apologetic book. It's enough to say that Christian marriages should, in general, be open to children.

It's probably just as well that this chapter is already too long, so I don't feel I can spare much space for a topic that has been rather too much discussed in recent years, namely, homosexuality. Unfortunately, some people, though very few, probably less than 1% of the population, feel erotic desires chiefly or exclusively for people of their own sex. It has sometimes been claimed that such desires are genetically determined and innate, but that can't be true, because identical twins with exactly the same DNA often differ in their sexual orientation. If one identical twin separated at birth is gay, the other probably isn’t. Nonetheless, it seems clear that homoerotic attraction is often involuntary and can't be stopped merely by choice. 

Christianity counsels those who experience homoerotic desire not to act on it. Those who feel exclusively homoerotic desire may reasonably feel that this makes it impossible for them to marry. Lifelong celibacy is a heavy demand to make. Mainstream society has come to find this unreasonable, and prefers to approve of homosexual sex. And the unique institution of same-sex “marriage,” which would have sounded like a sick joke to the vast majority of historic mankind, has been introduced, partly, it seems, as a way to compel approval of homosexual sex, and partly because people are so confused about the meaning of marriage that they don't know how to resist any redefinition of it.

In fact, no state of marriage can ever exist between the members of a same-sex couple, because the genes and instincts in play are quite different. As an actual, empirical fact, same-sex couples do not exhibit the same propensity for lifelong fidelity that married, heterosexual couples do. And there is no reason, morally speaking, why they should. Gay men are generally not exclusive in their sexual relationships. Why should they be? Men's selfish genes insist on fidelity in wives, because of the imperative of paternity certainty, but prefer promiscuity for themselves. A gay male lover can provide no offspring, so there's no genetic incentive to insist on his fidelity. Similarly, lesbian relationships are generally less enduring than straight marriages, for there's no need to secure permanent attachment of a lesbian lover for the sake of parental investment in shared offspring. Marriage has an ethical aspect, in that married people ought to practice lifelong fidelity, and society ought to recognize and support their determination to do so, and these moral facts are indispensable to the definition of what marriage is. But no moral duty of lifelong fidelity can exist between same-sex couples, nor has society any duty to recognize or encourage a lifelong fidelity in them that lacks a basis in their instincts or fruits in the welfare of children.

Nor is there any reason to regard same-sex couples as familial units. Marriage creates kin relationships, because, for example, a son-in-law’s children will be the father-in-law’s grandchildren, creating an instinctive allyship. But a gay male lover or lesbian female lover will never be a blood relation at second hand, so the basic reason why spouses should be recognized by relatives as kin does not apply. In general, the institution of gay “marriage” involves a kind of playacting. We pretend it’s the same thing, out of pity, but we're not being honest, because it isn't. 

The disproportionate attention paid to gay marriage in recent years may be motivated by a widespread desire to redefine straight marriage. The social meaning of marriage in mainstream society has been greatly weakened over the past couple of generations by tolerance for premarital sex and the new legal ease of divorce, as well as widespread contraception and legal abortion. Many want to be “married” without locking themselves into lifelong promises, and especially, without sacrificing their careers, hobbies, and/or independence to the all-consuming duty of childrearing. But they would have reason to worry that their marriages would seem less real and respected than those of people for whom marriage meant a commitment to permanence, exclusivity, and fertility. The campaign to extend marriage to same-sex couples has helped to fulfill the Sexual Revolution, focusing attention on and lending authority to childless, at-will marriages, and marginalizing the old ideal of Christian marriages. This makes it more important than ever for Christians self-consciously to commit to Christian marriage and not to whatever the word “marriage” means or might mean in future in secular society. Secular society no longer knows what marriage means. Christians must look to their own traditions for the meaning of marriage and ignore contemporary mainstream society, which is now only a source of confusion and temptation on this topic.

People feel a natural repugnance to homosexuality, which is probably significant, but I won't try here to discern how. I can't interpret the repugnance or take lessons from it. What I do know is that sexuality is very absorbing, and tends to soak up lots of time and energy that could and would be put to other uses. Marriage is a distraction from so much else, and it would impoverish society if it didn't give back in the form of children. But with same-sex couples, we know in an advance that they can never produce offspring, so there is no social gain to offset the loss. 

Of course, there is now gay adoption, so children might be involved after all. But that makes it worse. Sociobiology makes clear why it’s best for children to be raised by their biological parents. But adoption by a straight couple can more or less fool all the selfish genes involved, and simulate a natural family. By contrast, the selfish genes are obviously not so stupid as to think two men or two women can be the parents of a child, so the helpful instincts do not come into play. And of course, while our society permits much that it shouldn’t in the name of “consent,” the principle does have some force, and the fact that children can’t consent to gay adoption greatly exacerbates our society’s guilt in subjecting them to it. No Christian should collaborate in this wicked traffic in children, and some Christian adoption agencies have rightly shut down their operations rather than let themselves be forced by evil city and state governments to broker gay adoptions.

Will a person burdened with homoerotic desires serve his fellow men better in resolute celibacy, with a possibility that heterosexual desire and chances at fertility may appear at some point, or by committing to, and pouring scarce time and emotional resources into, a necessarily infertile sexual relationship, to which others feel natural repugnance, and perhaps forcing them to pretend that it’s a marriage? Celibacy, of course, is the better choice.

Finally, there is one point of historic Christian sexual ethics, to which not only modern but even most of Protestant civilization is decidedly cold: praise of and encouragement of lifelong virginity and the monastic life. Jesus prophesied monasticism when He taught that “there are eunuchs in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). There is an aspect of monasticism that unbelievers can't be expected to understand: the joy of prayer, of the simple life, of ever deeper humility, of encountering God in the wilderness. But there is another aspect of it which it's really rather stupid of the modern West to fail to understand. For monks and nuns are useful. 

The marriage market can't match everyone. Accidents of taste, gender ratios, etc. inevitably leave some people mateless. So it's nice if there are communities they can go to to avoid being lonely. That's one piece of the puzzle. But there are also jobs that don't fit well with being married and raising a family, such as a life of exploration and colonization of new lands, a life intensely devoted to scholarship and education, a life of service to the sick or the poor, or a dissident life, peacefully but dauntlessly critiquing a bad regime. Monks and nuns have done all this and more, with vast benefits for civilization along the way. It helps that they form such stable, tight-knit communities, living together and holding all things in common. Family people can't do that, because families need privacy. But monks and nuns are different, and often they are able to do things that secular people can't, because of their family obligations. The Benedictine monks were the great bridge of literate civilization across the Dark Ages, copying texts and preserving the skills of reading and writing, and Mother Theresa resolutely served the poor of Calcutta, to cite just two of many, many examples. 

Christendom was not the first to value celibacy. The Greeks admired the virginity of the mythical divine huntress Artemis. In Rome, for a thousand years, virgins were consecrated to Vesta, goddess of the hearth, and regarded with awe. But there were never more than six or seven vestal virgins, and their sacred virginity was not a lifelong vocation anyway, but lasted thirty years, after which they could marry. It's useful for some to forgo marriage, but celibacy is a hard vocation to recruit people to. That's not surprising, since celibacy is the death of our selfish genes, so all our instincts must be against it. Historic Christianity is unique in the abundance of those volunteering to lead celibate lives for its sake. 

But Christian churches have never ordered people to lives of celibacy, or told people that it was necessary for salvation. Monasticism began as a bottom-up affair, with some enthusiasts running off into the wilderness to lead solitary lives of intense poverty and ceaseless prayer, and others following them, until communities formed around them. Why? Where does the monastic impulse come from, generation after generation? There would seem to be no explanation except that Christian prayer can be, and if practiced much tends to become, an activity so desirable and fulfilling that it eclipses all other desires, and for its sake alone will many people willingly, permanently choose to give up all the pleasures of sexuality and family, and deny all the most urgent desires and instincts of the flesh. The communities formed around the desire for prayer can then be put to many socially useful tasks, and sometimes provide a better option than loneliness for some of the unfortunate involuntary celibates that the imperfection of marriage markets inevitably makes.

In all this, no appeal has been made to the authority of the Bible, or the Church, or anything like that. It wasn't needed. All I needed to get to Christian rules of sexual ethics was the realistic view of human sexual instincts supplied by selfish genes sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, and basic Golden Rule ethics. That's not to say I could have discovered the rules if I had never been taught them. It takes great genius to invent the wheel, but it's less difficult to explain how the wheel works after having seen one. So here. It was an amazing achievement of Christianity to invent faithful, lifelong, monogamous marriage, suppress polygamy and prostitution, and all the rest of it, but now that the riddle of sexual morality has been solved, reason can see why Christianity’s solution is right. The West has to keep itself in an irrational frenzy with popular music and romantic movies, and numb its mind with political correctness, to avoid seeing the truth about sexual ethics that Christianity long ago revealed.

Before ending this chapter, I have to make a disclaimer. These arguments are quite original. An apologist does not like to be very original, because he is trying to be the spokesman for a two-thousand-year-old tradition. In this case, as far as I've been able to discover, while older Christian teachers have certainly discussed sexual ethics, they always seem to have done it in a way that takes for granted much that the modern West doubts. Even CS Lewis and GK Chesterton, though their arguments are helpful, lacked the insights of Darwinian sociobiology that make it possible to argue for chastity with unprecedented power. As always, but especially here, I hope that readers unconvinced by my arguments will blame me, and not Christianity, for their failure, and not dismiss the faith just because one apologist'sv arguments fall short.

But I don't think they fall short, and I can't imagine readers thoroughly understanding the arguments I presented here without being convinced by them. I'm not at all tentative in presenting them. Rightly or wrongly, I find my own arguments for Christian positions that are denied by the broader culture too overwhelming to be doubted, and I pity the blindness of anyone who will still disagree with Christianity about sexual ethics after reading them. I think it's common for theorists to be overconfident about their own theories. The labor of working them out causes the theorist to be highly convinced by them as well, often more than the real strength of the arguments warrants. So please, come knock me off my high horse! If you have any residual doubts, muster your thoughts, charge in, and try to prove me wrong!

While sexual effects is one topic among many about which Christianity teaches, and far from the most important or central, yet I expect the persuasive bang for the buck to be unusually high, since this is an area where mainstream culture most often denies Christian teachings. We can describe the persuasive effect as a Bayesian updating problem. Suppose a person finds substantial appeal in Christianity, yet sees no point in its sexual rules. He therefore rates the likelihood of Christianity being true at just 20%. He thinks that chastity is right with 99% probability if Christianity is true, since it's very unlikely that he's misunderstood the Church's teachings on this point, but with only 10% probability of Christianity is false, since he sees no other reason to believe in chastity except whatever intellectual authority maybe attributed to the Church. Then suppose he reads the arguments in this chapter and realizes the chastity is right after all. How will he rationally adjust his subjective probability that Christianity is true. Applying Bayes' Law:

P(A) = 0.2

P(B|A) = 0.99

P(B|~A) = 0.1

P(B) = P(B|A)*P(A) + P(B|~A)*P(~A) = 0.278

P(A|B) = P(B|A)*P(A)/P(B) = 0.71

So in plausible cases like this one, being convinced on rational grounds of the moral rightness of Christian sexual rules could flip a person from being largely a non-believer to being a tentative believer who grants the faith 71% odds of being true. 

I think even Christian young people today usually need to withdraw, so to speak, from the bank of faith in order to subsidize an acceptance of sexual rules that they don't find convincing per se. The triumph of an argument from the Golden Rule and sociobiology in favor of chastity should empower them to pay back the loan to the bank of faith, with interest. My own faith in youth was weakened by the intellectual strain of believing in teachings about sex for which I saw no justification. Now that my eyes have been opened, Christianity's steadfast teaching of chastity down the ages shows how wise it is, and makes my faith stronger.

And with that, we can finally leave behind this narrow special topic, and take up where we left off at the end of chapter 9. We had been in search of the grand coherence of truth, the ultimate explanation of things, the last secret behind the world, the right worldview. And we had just dismissed one failed candidate, scientific materialism. In this four-chapter digression, we have dealt with and dispelled the two most obvious disqualifying objections to Christianity. Now we are ready to study and assess its claims as a whole. Clearly, Christianity is not, so to speak, merely one more citizen in the republic of our beliefs. It is either the rightful king, long exiled, whose coronation alone can end a civil war and restore order in our minds, or else it is a usurper who must be driven out. So let us consider the case.