Mary Eberstadt has new book about religious freedom called It’s Dangerous to Believe.
Eberstadt’s book is amazing. She explains how we got to the present moment in which religious believers are being hounded from the public square and exposes the dissonance between the secularists’ bleating for “freedom” with their eager use of McCarthyite tactics.
One of Eberstadt’s key insights is that the entire showdown isn’t about religion at all. It’s about sex. If the modern secularist left believes in anything, it’s a God-given right to consequence-free sex. That’s why abortion is a cornerstone of liberalism.
But liberals think that sex shouldn’t just be free of physical consequences, but of moral ones, too. Even disapproval is unacceptable. Which is why they target Catholic schools that don’t want gay spiritual directors and pizza parlors that theoretically wouldn’t want to cater same-sex weddings.
Eberstadt counsels religious believers to understand that what has happened in the West isn’t really that the idea of faith has been eclipsed. Instead, she writes, “We need to understand that there’s a new faith in Western civilization: a quasi-religious faith in the developing secularist catechism about the sexual revolution.”
And on the merits, the modes of expression of traditional religious belief stack up surprisingly well against the sexual revolution. For example, married households are better off than cohabiting households. Children of married couples do better (in terms of education, income, and incarceration rates) than their peers. Young men and women who wait longer to have sex do better in terms of education attainment and income. Just in terms of outcomes, it’s tough to beat traditionalism. As Russell Moore put it last year, “The sexual revolution cannot keep its promises.”
It’s Dangerous to Believe is a tour de force, essential reading for anyone wondering how our civilization can survive the current moment.
