Legalized Sexual Anarchy: Does Reason Rescue this Idol?

Christ, Caesar, or Self:  Recognizing Political Idolatry Idols in Our Midst – Part 5

By Dr. Jeffery J Ventrella, TruthXchange Newsletter, 7/24

“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity . . . by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media.”^[1]

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”^[2]

With their silver and gold they made idols 

For their own destruction.^[3]

“Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD”^[4]

Introduction

Last week’s Dicta edition confirmed that Society has been damaged by the pagan affirmation of autonomous reason and the Individual:  My Wayism.  Let’s dig a bit deeper as we conclude this series.  

What is the role of reason in law and policy endeavors?  Can we reason our way out of the current idolatrous political and legal mess?  Isn’t reason unaffected by paganism and therefore neutral?  Should we just defer to the supposedly smarter elites – the experts – who rely on their own reason? How should we think Christianly about . . . thinking???  Let’s get to the gist.

Reason’s Role:  Reliable Ruler or Tempered Tool?

A political (and pagan) variant of My Wayism rests on the premise that mankind can employ supposedly neutral reason to navigate and solve matters of the public square.  Proposals include using unaided or supposedly non-religious reason to “read” the natural world – apart from Scripture. This would be the process of a supposed “Christian Prince”^[5] who then deploys State Power^[6] to solve society’s ills.  Similar proposals using other pagan commitments abound.^[7]  Many of these proposals may “look good in the locker room”,^[8] but inevitably fail when applied in the real world.  And more fundamentally, their commitment to and use of reason imports a pagan My Wayism version of it.  How so?

Certainly, reason is one of God’s gifts to mankind. Possessing a reasoning soul forms an inherent constituent feature of mankind’s nature.^[9]  So far so good.  Yet, having reason is different from using reason properly – reason can be wrongly used.  We need to consider how we ought to utilize the gift of reason.  What is reason’s role?  How does that role fit or serve political calculations?  

Paganized versions of reason as employed by Christian Nationalism and Neo-Confucianism consider reason as a judge instead of a tool – the difference is stark.  When reason becomes a judge, that is, an ultimate moral adjudicator, this puts God on trial.^[10]  Humanist Isaac Asimov candidly describes reason being the ultimate compass for success:

“Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying humans needs and serving human interests.”^[11]

This sentiment encapsulates the Idol of Self:  autonomous reason, self-derived values with the goal of attaining personal satisfaction.  Historical theologian Carl Trueman explains the operation of this ethos in today’s culture:

“An overriding desire for inner personal happiness and a sense of psychological well-being lie at the heart of the modern age and make ethics at root a subjective discourse.  Human beings may still like to think they believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal, emotional, and psychological preferences.” ^[12]

This is a core component of the pagan impulse, originating in the Serpent’s nudging of Eve, which impugned God’s moral ultimacy by subjecting it to skepticism:  

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You[a] shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”^[13] 

Reason should be valorized as a tool,^[14] but cannot rightly serve as an ultimate adjudicator as the Serpent tempted.  Our thinking, that is, the use of reasoning, should be subordinate to Christ.  Notice Paul’s command for how to use our minds and our reasoning:

For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.^[15]

Reason, properly understood, is a tool, a weapon when submitted to Christ.  In contrast, the Enlightenment trumpeted a quite different conception of reason, deeming it unaided and supposedly autonomous.  This coheres with and serves the Idol of Self and became prominent in post-Enlightenment political musings:  Locke, Hobbes, Hume, and then later Bentham and Mill.

But, this idolatrous Enlightenment thinking regarding the Self, is not, and cannot actually be, autonomous, as then-Cardinal Ratzinger noted:

“Of course, the attempt to use a strictly autonomous reason that refuses to know about faith, to pull ourselves out of the slough of uncertainties by our own hair, so to speak, can hardly succeed in the end.  For human reason is not autonomous at all.  It is always living in one historical context or other.”^[16]

Put differently, as James Davison Hunter explained, reasoning always occurs in a context, that is, a worldview:

“All human reasoning and understanding, all human morality, and all human visions of beauty are rooted in the particularity of tradition, narrative, and community and the only question is to what degree do they conform to the nomos [law]” ^[17]

As a result, the life of the mind cannot be neutral; it will always refer—positively or negatively—at some level to the “real reality” of God and Hetero-cosmology.  As Dr. Van Til crystallized:

“Every time any human being opens his mouth to say anything, he either says that God is[,] or that God is not[,] a reality.  It could not be otherwise.  God claims to control every fact.”^[18]

This means that while mankind does reason, that reasoning is always on account of some assumed vision of reality or worldview:  paganism, in one of its many permutations, or Christianity.  There’s more.

We also know that the Fall impacted reason, skewing it.^[19]  As Paul teaches, fallen man suppresses the truth and in doing so becomes futile in his reasoning.  He in effect divinizes autonomous reason and radical autonomy.  This produces callous anti-human trajectories.  For example, the crabbed reasoning of Ann Furedi and Sarah Ditum as they advocate for abortion – actively suppressing truth – proclaims that radical autonomy – unaided reason – justifies even sex-selection abortion:

“And, as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy.  As the conscious and legally competent entity in the conception set-up, it’s the woman’s say that counts, and even the most terrible reason for having an abortion holds more sway that the best imaginable reason for compelling a woman to carry to term. . . . What’s the difference with sex selection?  The most obvious objection is that it doesn’t matter what sex a baby is . . . In those situations, a woman wouldn’t just be justified in seeking sex selection abortion; she’d be thoroughly rational to do so.”^[20]

When popular culture trumpets – without shame – messages like this, it is no surprise to Paul that courts – which approve unrighteous practices (Rm. 1:32), including practices derived from autonomous and defective reasoning – will “reason” like this:

“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”^[21]

This reflects a codified expression of reasoning being futile.  This idol of Self has sadly become an embedded “fundamental” for US jurisprudence in the context of sexual conduct – just as Paul had explained.  The Idol of Self relying on unfettered radical autonomy is the fulcrum which the courts used to accelerate and enforce today’s sexual anarchy.  Autonomous reasoning led to autonomous ethics which leads so societal and sexual chaos. This chaos is being increasingly normalized then codified by law and policy.  This shows us why politics, elections, and judicial appointments matter.  

The following tracks how the Idol of Self and radical autonomy underlie US law and policy regarding sexual behavior.  First, understand that the Left’s Cultural Marxism intentionally sought to undermine Christian sexual ethics.  Hear the reasoning of Herbert Marcuse, one of the New Left’s leading prophets:

The body in its entirety would become . . . a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure.  This change in the value and scope in libidinal relationships would lead to a disintegration of the institutions in which the private interpersonal relations have been organized, particularly the [Christian] monogamic and patriarchal family.^[22]

Here’s the equation:  disrupt Christian sexuality and thereby destroy Christian institutions, as foundational to the Marxist cultural revolution.

Next, the Left, armed with this pagan game plan, began to assault Western Christian social structures in the courts, particularly geared toward undermining Christian sexuality.

In Griswold,^[23] the court severed the relationship between sex and diapers.  A jurisprudential pattern then emerged – a direct line foreshadowing same-sex “marriage.”  However, before the advocates could legally undermine institutional marriage, they first needed to sever the relationship between sex and diapers. This effort initially sought to eliminate the proscription on married couples using contraception;^[24] next, they pushed for permitting contraception for sexual conduct outside of matrimony^[25] thereby normalizing fornication; now, under the Affordable Care Act (“Obama Care”), contraception, including abortion, is being mandated as “health care” covered by insurance.  Ironically, it’s no longer a choice, but a mandate – you will be made to care^[26].  In Paul’s lingo, it is not only practiced, but also approved.^[27]

Robert Reilly explains the logic of this strategy and how it led directly to ultimately normalizing same-sex “marriage” in the law:

“First, short-circuit the generative power of sex through contraception; then kill its accidental offspring; and finally celebrate its use in ways unfit for generation.  Contraception used to be proscribed then it was prescribed, and now has become almost obligatory in the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, which proposes to penalize employers who do not provide it, along with abortifacients and sterilization procedures, to their employees with fines of $100 per worker per day.”^[28]

And, this logic has, again following Paul, been increasingly codified by Supreme Court decisions in US jurisprudence:

• 1965 – Griswold^[29]
• 1972 – Eisenstadt^[30]
• 1973 – Roe^[31]
• 1992 – Casey^[32]
• 1996 – Roemer^[33]
• 2003 – Lawrence^[34]
• 2013 – Windsor^[35]
• 2015 – Obergefell^[36]

Thus, the law is becoming increasingly epistemologically self-conscious regarding the transcendent standards driving judicial thinking—and they do not stem from the Divine Law.  Rather, they manifest the idolization of the Self, the bitter fruit of false worship and fallen reasoning conveyed by many false prophets.  Consider several examples:

An ACLU leader “interpreting” the 1st amendment:  

“Thus, the First Amendment creates an inescapable moral relativism, societal and cultural, for our nation taken as a whole.  For example, I view homosexual sexual activity as not only not immoral, or sinful, or wrong, or undesirable, but as affirmatively moral, and virtuous, and right, and desirable.  I take that as a moral absolute…I am not willing to concede that my moral absolutes are any less absolute than those of more orthodox religions that take an opposing view, nor need I in America.”^[37]

Of course, the actual text of that amendment in no way mentions or references sexual conduct.

One jurist’s view echoing this ethical subjectivism:

“The judgments about the constitution are value judgments.  Judges exercise their own independent value judgments.  You reach the answer that essentially your values tell you to reach.^[38]

Another man’s view, then Senator Barak Obama:

[A]s radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.  It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. ^[39].

This derives from Obama’s view of “sin”:

Q:  What is sin?

A:  Being out of alignment with my values^[40]

Yet another man’s view – Justice Thurgood Marshall:

“I do what I think is right and let the law catch up with me.”^[41]

This is institutionalized standard fare for the Progressive Left – consider the ACLU’s Policy position from over 30 years ago:

“The ACLU believes that criminal and civil laws prohibiting or penalizing the practice of plural marriage violate constitutional protections of freedom of expression and association, freedom of religion, and privacy for personal relationships between consenting adults.”^[42]

Ideas have consequences.  Following the ACLU’s dog whistling melody New York City codified this idea:

Gender identity is an individual’s sense of being either male or female, man or woman, or something other or in between^[43]

Because these idolatrous standards do not derive from the Creator, they will not—Pollyanna promises aside—promote real human flourishing in the long term.  Instead, confusion and dissatisfaction will abound.  As Santiago, a Columbia University Freshman wearily lamented:

“Why do only certain letters [LGBT] get to be in the full acronym?  We have our lesbians, our gays, bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual [pause to take a breath] . . . Pansexual. Omnisexual.  Trisexual. Agender.  Bi-gender. Third gender.  Transgender.  Transvestite. Intersexual.  Two-Spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous. Undecided.  Questioning.  Other.  Human.”^[44]

The sexual anarchy spawned by this idolatrous sexual alchemy abound:  Pregnant “men”^[45]; transsexuals marrying one another^[46]; women “marrying” themselves^[47].

These phenomena raise a primary question:  If the Self is prior to God, how can there be any real law?  Instead, there is no real law, and without any transcendent standard, only the coercive power of the State remains.  Again, paganism, using reason as a judge, drives the merging of the Idols, State and Self.

Thus, the Idols of Self and State necessarily correlate, as Paul would expect.  Under non-Pauline cosmology, the State now exists to protect individual desires – whatever they may be – which the law increasingly deems to be “rights”:

“Therefore, the liberal state does not define law in terms of the promotion of virtue and the prohibition of vice, but in terms of the protection and promotion of individuals’ private pleasures, which—since all such pleasures are natural—are declared to be rights.  Any limitation of these “rights” is considered unjust; that is, justice is redefined to mean everyone getting as much of whatever he or she wants as long as he or she doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s pursuit of pleasure.”^[48]

Consequently, convergence is inevitable, again as Paul noted:  that which is practiced must be approved.  Roger Trigg explains:

“The more the role of the individual is extolled, the more powerful the state has to become, since the role of any protective institutions, even that of the family, to act as buffers between the state and the individual is eroded.”^[49]

This literally leads to nowhere, to nihilism:

“The noble type of person feels that hedetermines value, he does not need anyone’s approval, he judges that “What is harmful to me is harmful in itself,” he knows that he is the one who gives honor to things in the first place, he creates values.  He honors everything he sees in himself:  this sort of morality is self-glorifying.”^[50]  

Make no mistake:  When individualist desires are deemed to be “human rights,” rights then coercively enforced by the State, real persons will be dehumanized, or even killed:

“For if ‘choice’ is the moral imperative guiding abortion, then there is no way to take a stand against ‘gendercide.’  Aborting a baby because she is a girl is no different from aborting a baby because she has Down syndrome or because the mother’s ‘mental health’ requires it.  Choice is choice.  One Indian abortionist tells Ms. Hvistendahl:  ‘I have patients who come and say ‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’

This is where choice leads.^[51]  

Under pagan cosmology, horoscopes become scopes of horror.  Cosmology matters because it defines “real reality” and thus “the morally permissible” on both the macro and micro level.  This is Paul’s point, which links the Self and the State.  Any informed view of law and policy must take these realities into account, and they can only be rightly taken into account when every thought is captured by Christ.^[52]

Conclusion

Is there rhyme or reason for the societal tensions and turmoil presently dominating the news cycle?  St. Paul actually provides both the rhyme and the reason.  Paul avoids picking winners and losers between the State and the Self.  In fact, he affirms both the necessity and goodness of the State as well as the dignity and value of each human life.  He does this by “changing the game,” seeing the competition of the One and Many as a false dichotomy.

He arrives at this solution by rooting his understanding in a cosmological reality, a reality that Truthxchange unapologetically trumpets.  That reality is ordered by a Triune Creator God who is above all, who in turn and in love orders the creation with a law from above.  As this God is both One and Many,^[53] it follows that in this God’s created order there will also be One and Many, but with neither being ultimate; rather both are ordered, when rightly conceived, to promote human flourishing.

But, Paul further tells us that all is not well in Paradise; in fact, the world, in seeking autonomy, left Paradise behind.  As a result, mankind’s religious impulse is not extinguished, but it is malformed and misdirected—still expressed and practiced, but in an idolatrous and self-seeking way.  It is this idolatry that triggers the imbalance between Self and State, because as Paul tells us:  How we conceive “real” reality correlates to how we act sexually, and how we act sexually ultimately orders society, including what society approves, its law and policy.  

Yet, in our drive to be justified apart from Paul’s rescuing God, we seek to have our autonomous practices, including basal sexual practices, approved. And, fallen reason does not cure, but only exasperates and justifies these pagan practices.

This is nothing less than destructive idolatry, whether of Self or State:

They made kings, but not through me. [Idols of State]

They set up princes, but I knew it not. [Idols of State]

With their silver and gold they made idols [Idols of Self]

For their own destruction.^[54]

When the Self becomes the idolatrous Creative God, it needs the State to become the idolatrous Enforcing/Redeeming God—neither of which promotes human flourishing.  This false cosmology instead undermines mediating associations, constricts diversity, provides a predicate for tyranny, and dehumanizes the weakest and most vulnerable, all the while targeting true religion for privatization, stigma, censure, and/or even penal sanction.

But, Paul, the realistic optimist, also grants us the way forward; we by God’s grace must be:

  [t]hose who no longer live for themselves . . .”^[55]

The Self is not, nor can it be ultimate – nor can any law or policy that is predicated on this idol.

The State likewise is not, nor can it be ultimate.  Because law expresses Lordship, getting Lordship and the attendant cosmology right will correctly order society and the public square in a way that spurs human flourishing, including a non-idolatrous politics.  It is St. Paul’s explication which animates Jesus’ directive to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”^[56]  Thus, under Christ there shall be righteous harmony between Caesar and Self.  This is Paul’s burden as well as his solution:

“For from him and through him and to him are all things.  To him be glory forever.  Amen.”^[57]

[1] Melvin Tinker, That Hideous Strength:  A Deeper Look at How the West Was Lost (2020), 39 citing Robert J. Smith, “Cultural Marxism:  Imaginary or Revolutionary Reality?” (2019) 444

[2] Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 852 (1992).

[3] Hos. 8:4 .

[4] Is. 1:18

[5] This is the utopian pipedream of Stephen Wolfe’s Christian Nationalism.  

[6] As noted in last week’s Dicta, this comprises the inevitable result of idolatry:  the Idols of Self and State merge.

[7] For example, this is the vision of Neo-Confucianist scholar, Jiang Qing. who posits a social structure in which a political branch of the State, the House of Ru (Heaven) led by a “wise sagacious” learned Confucian ruler who dispenses moral edits that order society – the parallel to Wolfe’s prince is plain – both are animated by pagan idolatrous impulses.  For an analysis and fair, but devasting rebuttal, see Kevin Vallier, All the Kingdoms of the World – One Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, 229-245 (2023)

[8] A reference from the 1998 film Ronin.

[9] Formula of Chalcedon:  Christ is “truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable [rational] soul and body.”  https://anglicansonline.org/basics/chalcedon.html

[10] Compare, C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (1970)

[11] Quoted in Erick Erickson, You Shall Be as Gods – Pagans, Progressives, and the Rise of the Woke Gnostic Left (2024), 17

[12] Carl. R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self:  Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (2020), 88

[13] Gen. 3:1

[14] Is. 1:18: “Come, let us reason together”  

[15] 2 Cor. 10:4-6

[16] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance—Christian Belief and the World Religions (2003), 135-36.  Unfortunately, many Catholics committed to a strict Thomism miss this important point.

[17] James Davison Hunter, To Change the World—The Irony, Tragedy, & Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World,(2010), 233.

[18] Cornelius Van Til, “Our Attitude Toward Evolution,” The Banner, December 11, 1931, reproduced in Van Til:  Science Articles(Philadelphia: Westminster Theological Seminary), 12.

[19] As Paul puts it, fallen mankind “became futile in their thinking.”  Romans 1:21

[20] “Why women have a right to sex-selective abortion,” Sarah Ditum, The Guardian, September 19, 2013.

[21] Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 852 (1992).

[22] Quoted in Mike Gonzalez, BLM – The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, (2021), 153

[23] Griswald v. Connecticut, 381 U.S.479 (1965).

[24] TxC takes no position regarding the moral status of non-abortifacient contraception other than simply noting that the unanimous Christian witness until the 20th century opposed its use until 1930.  See, Timothy Willem Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857-1957 (2012), chapter 5

Tellingly, the advocates for Griswold’s anti-contraception litigation immediately after winning in the Supreme Court noted that the legal predicate for attacking anti-abortion law now existed – and they litigated heavily and achieved Roe v. Wade just eight years later.  See, Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State:  How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and Why the Church Was Right All Along (2018), 114

[25] Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972)

[26] Erick Erikson, You Will Be Made to Care:  The War on Faith, Family, and Your Freedom to Believe (2016)

[27] Romans 1:32

[28]Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything (2014), 211.  He goes on to connect this predicate to its logical conclusion of legally redefining marriage to include same-sex structures.

[29] Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (holding that laws proscribing the sale of contraceptive products to married couples violated the “right of privacy” found in “emanations formed by penumbras” thereby severing sex from diapers).

[30] Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972)) (extending the Griswold holding to unmarried actors).

[31] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1972) (holding that a constitutional “right” exists to address the failure of contraception by permitting abortion for any reason or no reason at any time during pregnancy).

[32] Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S.833 (1992) (reaffirming the core holding of Roe and shifting the justification to the “sweet mystery of life” rationale).

[33] Roemer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620 (1996) (citing purported animus against a particular group as justifying the invalidation of a state law). 

[34] Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) (invalidating a state criminal prohibition against same-sex sodomy citing Casey).

[35] Windsor v. United States, 570 U.S. 744 (2013) (invalidating sections of DOMA citing among other things purported animus)

[36] Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) (addressing whether the Fourteenth Amendment (1) requires recognition by one state of a same-sex “marriage” solemnized in another state; and (2) requires states to permit same-sex “marriages”).

[37] Franklin E. Kameny—Board member, ACLU, the District of Columbia: “Deconstructing the Traditional Family” in The World and I, October 1993, 384F.

[38] Cited in Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (2012), 164.

[39] WBEZ-FM, The Court and Civil Rights, Chicago Public Radio, the Odyssey series, January 18, 2001.

[40] Mark Steyn, After America (2012) quoting Chicago Sun-Times religious correspondent Cathleen Falsani.

[41] Justice Thurgood Marshall, quoted in Mark W. Smith, Disrobed—The New Battle Plan to Break the Left’s Stranglehold on the Courts, (2006), 62.

[42] ACLU, 1992 Policy Guide.

[43] Guidelines Regarding “Gender Identify” Discrimination, A Form of Gender Discrimination Prohibited by The New York City Human Rights Law (Title 8 of the Administrative Code of the City of New York).  

[44] “Generation LGBTQIA,” New York Times, January 9, 2013.

[45] “’Pregnant Man’ Thomas Beatie Debuts Baby Pictures, Shares Birth Story,” Huffington Post, July 31, 2008.

[46] “Our gender swap wedding,” The Independent, November 10, 2014.

[47] “Single mother-of-two reveals why she married HERSELF and even goes on date nights alone,” The Daily Mail UK, May 24, 2012.

[48] Benjamin Wiker, Worshipping the State: How Liberalism Became Our State Religion (2013), 172.

[49] Roger Trigg, Equality, Freedom, and Religion (2012), 12.

[50] G.K. Beale, We Become What We Worship, (2008), 293, citing  Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil:  Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 154.

[51] Jonathan Last, in the Wall Street Journal reviewing Hvistendahl’s book, cited in Brian G. Mattson, Politics & Evangelical Theology: A Guide for Concerned Christians and Political Progressives (2012), 67.

[52] 2 Cor. 10:4-6

[53] The true and living God is one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

[54] Hos. 8:4 .

[55] 2 Cor. 5:15 .

[56] Mt. 22:21.

[57] Rm. 11:36.