Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All

VICTIMS OF THE REVOLUTION

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. Scripture quotations marked (NRSVCE) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Cover design by Enrique J. Aguilar

© 2025 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

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Foreword © 2025 by Ryan T. Anderson

ISBN 978-1-62164-770-6 (PB)

ISBN 978-1-64229-343-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2024951806

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For Julie—wife, mother, and subeditor

Across the pale parabola of joy

CONTENTS

Foreword by Ryan T. Anderson

Preface

Introduction

1 From Liberation to Loneliness

2 Abortion Hardens the Hearts It Doesn’t Stop

3 The Abolition of Man and Woman: From Self-Creation to Castration

4 The Wrongs of Gay Rights

5 Whose Liberation?

Conclusion: Authentic Humans, Authentic Human Flourishing

Acknowledgments

Notes

Previously Published Material

Index

FOREWORD

by Ryan T. Anderson

The sexual revolution has been a disaster. More than fifty years since the so-called Summer of Love, the victims are all around us: Unborn babies who never got to see the light of day. Kids who grew up without a father. Women who were used and abused by men for sexual gratification and then abandoned, left to fend for themselves. Men who are addicted to pornography and unable or at least unwilling to commit, thus missing out on one of life’s greatest joys: marriage and fatherhood. And now a cohort of kids who don’t feel comfortable as boys or girls, with irreversible damage being inflicted on their bodies and minds by adults who should know better. The sexual revolution is built on a series of lies about the human person. And there are human costs to getting human nature wrong.

Consent—that was the guiding principle of the sexual revolution. And consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want sexually—free in the legal sense from any restrictions or penalties, but also free in the cultural sense from any social opprobrium, from any cultural norms that might suggest a more humane approach to our sexual lives. Of course, consent alone cannot make an ethic; at the very least one needs something deeper in order to know when and where and how and why to consent. This is what traditional marital vows and norms provided. And, of course, what started as consenting adults quickly became applied to minors. Consenting teens should be free to … And consenting preteens … And it didn’t just stay restricted to sexual acts; it eventually progressed to sexual identities as well. If I should be free to engage in sex however I want, why shouldn’t I be free to be whatever sex (gender identity) I want? There is a certain debased logic to it all.

But where has this train of logic taken us? Now three generations into the sexual revolution, we see more and more Americans who have gone along with its consenting-adults mantra and the ensuing erosion of marital norms—the rise of cohabitation and the hookup culture, the normalization of premarital sex and nonmarital childbearing, the introduction of no-fault divorce laws and the more than doubling of divorce rates, and a marriage rate that has fallen by 65 percent since 1970. Compared to the pre-revolution ’60s, we’re left with fewer marriages, more divorce, fewer kids, and more atomized adults. The kids we do have are often growing up without dads, and many of our elderly are aging without spouses or adult children to care for them. Why now, when we have the best medical care in history, with the best pain management ever, do we think we need to kill our elderly with assisted suicide? The sexual revolution has not just attacked the transmission and beginnings of life but has also destroyed the matrix of love and care and support that the family provides throughout the life cycle, from birth to death.

And this has brought profound unhappiness. The sexual revolution is fundamentally opposed to marriage and the virtue that makes marriage possible, chastity. The sexual revolution says there’s nothing unique or special about marriage—at best, it’s simply one of many acceptable ways to consent to sex, and at worst it’s an outdated, overly restrictive institution of repression. But marriage is meant to bring together a man and a woman as husband and wife, committed to each other permanently and exclusively, so that any children their union may produce will have the love and care of both their mother and father. By ensuring a man and a woman commit to each other before engaging in the act that could produce new life, marriage helps guarantee that a mother and father will be committed to that new life. In other words, the way that you get fathers to commit to their kids is by first getting them to commit to their (future) children’s mother. We now have decades of social science research that confirms what every one of our grandparents knew because of the law written on the heart: that marriage is the best institution for the bearing and rearing of children. It protects against child poverty and increases the odds for social mobility; it decreases the rates of delinquency and crime while increasing the rates of graduation and employment. These goods—social justice, limited government, care for the poor, and the protection of freedom—are all better served by a healthy marriage culture than by the government picking up the pieces of a broken marriage culture.

But it’s not just these secular metrics of poverty and crime and employment that marriage affects. Marriage and family and children are the source of many of life’s deepest fulfillments and happiness. And yet millions of our neighbors now have missed out on these great goods. Perhaps that is the deepest form of victimization caused by the sexual revolution: the people who have gladly bought into its ideology and lived out its mantras, thinking they were being liberated from oppressive and outdated strictures, when in reality they were enslaving themselves to lives spent chasing fleeting dopamine and oxytocin hits. Consent plus condoms does not make people happy (or safe). No one on his deathbed looks back on his life and thinks of all his various and sundry orgasms. He does think of the love built up in a decades-long relationship with his spouse and in relationships with his children and grandchildren—something the sexual revolution simply can’t compete with.

And yet we have to be formed (and informed) to pursue such long-term, true fulfillment, especially in the face of the sexual revolution’s seductions for immediate gratifications. To a certain extent the entire point of civilization is to help people navigate the temptations for immediate satisfaction that come at the expense of long-term happiness. Cultures cultivate. That’s true of horticulture and agriculture just as much as it is of human culture. Good cultures cultivate natural capacities to their proper ends—in this case, our sexual capacities toward chaste marriage. But we’ve been living in a bad sexual culture for generations, and there’s been little sustained focus on combatting its corrupting lies.

The root cause of virtually all our social problems is the collapse of marriage and family following the sexual revolution. Yet so little sustained, organized, strategic effort has gone into responding to this collapse. We must think it through: How can we reach ordinary people who don’t know what the word anthropology means and help them reject the lies of the sexual revolution? How can we help people live the virtue of chastity? How can we help people get married and stay married? This is a daunting task. But if the real root causes of our suffering and loneliness and social malaise are the sexual practices that Americans have habituated for generations, then we need institutions that will combat the sexual revolution with the same sophistication with which conservatives have fought for judicial reform, regulatory reform, and economic reform.

And this is particularly urgent in our post-Roe, post-Dobbs world. I’ve spent the past two years running myself ragged trying to persuade people of the need to engage in our immediate battles (winning ballot initiatives, passing legislation, electing pro-life officials) without ignoring what should be our long-term priority. I use two statistics to illustrate that long-term goal, statistics about who gets an abortion and who gets aborted: 4 percent of babies conceived in marriage will be aborted, compared to 40 percent of children conceived outside marriage; and 13 percent of women who have abortions are married, while 87 percent are unmarried. Nonmarital sex is the main cause of abortion. Marriage is the best protector of unborn human life. As long as nonmarital sex is expected, large numbers of Americans will view abortion as necessary when contraception fails. As long as marriage rates are declining and the average age of marriage is delayed—though the human sex drive persists—abortion rates will remain high. Our primary task is not to persuade people of the humanity of the unborn—anyone who has ever seen an ultrasound knows all about that—but to change how people conduct their sexual lives. We have a pro-life movement, but could anyone seriously suggest that we have a pro-marriage or pro-chastity movement? New institutions and new initiatives must turn their attention to the real battlefield. But few people want to. Who wants to be viewed as a professional prude?

Nathanael Blake, that’s who. He has written a radical book. Radical not in the political sense of extreme or incendiary but in the etymological sense of radix, or root. Nathanael goes to the root of the sexual revolution and is therefore willing and able to tell the entire truth, including certain politically incorrect and momentarily unpopular truths that many influencers shy away from. Indeed, we live in an age when many sexual revolutionaries themselves are trying to contain the effects of the revolution they helped set in motion. The very people who pushed for the legal redefinition of marriage now object to the legal redefinition of sex as gender identity; the very people who deny biological reality in the womb rush to defend the biological reality of sex. But should we be surprised that the logic of my body, my choice is now being applied to gender identity? The conclusion follows naturally from the premise. Can we insist on the biological reality of sex while denying the biological reality of the unborn child? This far and no further has its limits. We should make tactical partnerships in the battles that can be won today. But we shouldn’t allow tactical alliances to cloud our vision of the truth. The revolution will eat its own, which is why we need someone like Nathanael who is willing to go all the way to the roots. He has written a profound book. May you profit by reading it and be inspired to become a counterrevolutionary.

PREFACE

This book began in Ryan Anderson’s living room. My family was visiting his farm, and over dinner and a few drinks, an idea for a book was conceived and a promise made to write a foreword if it was carried through.

That is enough backstory; this volume is not about where books come from but where babies come from. It is a book about sex and how our culture has gone wrong regarding it.

This is a Christian book written to Christians first, but it is not a work of theology, nor is it a Bible study. It is certainly not a personal testimony. And though I have noted areas where believers and churches may act, I have kept the suggestions brief—for example, this is not a guide for how pastors can prepare young men for marriage.

This book is a social critique grounded in the Christian natural law tradition. The argument, in its simplest form, is that Christian sexual morality is not arbitrary but directs us toward our good and that of others. Departing from it harms self and society. Christian sexual mores have always been imperfectly observed, but they are now scorned and derided. The sexual revolution has won, but its promises were empty.

This raises a point of terminology. Throughout the book I refer to the sexual revolution, sexual liberation, and sexual liberalism. These are related, but I try to use them distinctly. In succinct terms, the sexual revolution was an event (or ongoing series of events) staged in the cause of sexual liberation to establish a regime of sexual liberalism.

This book was written because the time is ripe for a counterattack. There are sorties in this direction—and not all from Christian conservatives, as seen in the recent trio of books by Christine Emba, Louise Perry, and Mary Harrington criticizing the sexual revolution. These books are good, even excellent, in many ways, but they are also insufficient. They leave much untouched and struggle to articulate a basis for how we should live.

In writing this book I have relied heavily on sources such as The Atlantic and The New York Times—when criticizing the world of sexual liberalism, it may help to use sources it trusts and to represent it with those it identifies with. Of course, given the nature of this project, there were inevitably some less prestigious sources. As I told my wife one day when she asked why I was reading a tawdry Daily Mail article, Because I’m writing a book about this.

Here is that book.

INTRODUCTION

After Sleeping with the Devil …

The devil may offer the world, but he’d rather give people hell.

Rejecting Satan and all his empty promises is not just a rhetorical flourish in traditional baptismal vows. The blandishments of sin are deceptive. The immediate enjoyment rarely lives up to the hype, and in the long run we find ourselves, in the words of C. S. Lewis’ wily devil Screwtape, ruled by an ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.¹

This is why the sexual revolution’s promises of freedom, authenticity, and happiness were empty indeed. The revolution’s ethos of sexual liberalism triumphed in the United States, insofar as people are now free to hop in and out of beds, relationships, marriages, and even genders as they wish. The acolytes of sexual liberation won with a half century of abortion on demand as a constitutional right, and a ferocious commitment to abortion in many states even after the Supreme Court corrected that error. They won by framing religious objections to, and opt-outs from, this new order as bigotry. The sexual revolution has conquered institutions from academia to Wall Street, which observe its holidays, fly its flags, and repeat its creeds. But though the new regime of sexual liberalism reigns almost unchallenged, it has failed on its own terms. It has not made Americans happy, or even sexually satisfied, let alone fixed the problems that its advocates claimed it would solve.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were assured that ditching traditional norms, obligations, and loyalties would allow people to be their authentic selves, liberated from the unwanted bonds and baggage of the past. People would be free to be who and what they want to be, to love whom and how they want, to enjoy what they want when they want it. This freedom would make us happy and eliminate, or at least reduce, the causes of social strife and oppression.

Yet we need only look around to see the failures of sexual liberation, from the social to the personal. At the civilizational level, Americans, along with much of the world, are increasingly unmarried and childless, with birthrates well below the replacement rate. Apparently, having babies is one of those jobs that Americans won’t do.

There is something wrong with a culture that cannot fulfill the imperative of pairing enough men and women to beget and raise its next generation—a civilizational ailment manifest in an aging, often lonely population.

Supporters of sexual liberation might reply that this chosen childlessness is a feature, not a bug. After all, the point of the sexual revolution was to give people more sexual and relational freedom, and so getting married and having children should be personal choices, not civilizational duties encouraged by social expectations and legal norms. So what if voluntary sterility has become normal and birthrates are declining throughout the world—especially in rich, developed nations?² Those who view the pressure to settle down and have kids as an imposition will shrug and say that’s the price of freedom. And they might add that though an aging, shrinking population poses challenges to everything from the economy to immigration, it is at least better for the environment.

Childlessness has been rebranded as a certified-green child-free lifestyle. And if this means more Americans live alone as they age, well, they will have the satisfaction of environmental virtue, as seen in a sympathetic 2021 New York Times piece profiling those choosing not to have children because of worries about the climate.³ And these Americans will enjoy lives lived on their own terms, without the inconveniences imposed by dependents. Consider, for example, a 2022 New York Times piece in which Frank Bruni extolled living alone—oh, the bliss of an uninterrupted morning coffee routine!⁴

This ode to solitude would be more persuasive if sexual liberalism were delivering on its promises of happiness—if the declines in marriage, childbearing, and family stability correlated with increased personal happiness. The truth is the reverse. Married people are, on average, happier than their unmarried peers. The same is true for churchgoers compared to the nonobservant and nonbelieving. And though they may be denounced as miserable puritans or hateful bigots, conservatives are generally happier than liberals.⁵ As Musa al-Gharbi wrote in a 2023 article for American Affairs, The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research…. Conservatives report significantly higher levels of happiness, meaning, and satisfaction in their lives as compared to liberals. Meanwhile, liberals are much more likely to exhibit anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychic distress.⁶

This happiness gap is at least partly due to conservative resistance to the sexual revolution. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox and his colleagues reported in 2021, liberals are happier when they get married, go to church, and have children. These habits of life used to be nonideological, but after the sexual revolution they are increasingly perceived as conservative. Thus, even those on the Left who personally live in these ways are reluctant to preach what they practice, and so Wilcox observed that the very institutions that might improve liberals’ happiness are increasingly viewed negatively by liberals.⁷ Ideological commitment to the sexual revolution is impeding happiness by discouraging the pursuit of better ways of life.

Sexual liberalism produces unhappiness because it is inimical to relationships and practices that offer us profound meaning and joy in life. Deep relationships require deep commitments, but sexual liberation requires that every romantic relationship (and therefore also every parental relationship) be severable. Thus, the sexual revolution doubly cheats its disciples. Not only does its ethos of pursuing immediate pleasure injure the commitment that is needed for lasting and fulfilling relationships, but it also provides far less sexual gratification than promised.

Rising singleness is not the result of Americans having too much fun to want to settle down. Rather, Americans are increasingly alone, depressed, and anxious, with fewer children than they say they want, and these lonely people are not filling their lives with great sex. Indeed, we are in the midst of a sex recession, as The Atlantic labeled it in a much-discussed 2018 story by Kate Julian. This reduction in the amount of sex Americans are having is not the result of a return to chastity but of people, especially younger people, struggling to pair up in a hookup culture. After all, for most people, having a regular sex life requires a committed partner. As Julian blandly put it, People who live with a romantic partner tend to have sex more than those who don’t.⁸

Thus, as much as men may want it, the old Playboy dream of a tall blonde today, a petite brunette tomorrow, a curvy redhead next week, and a sexual world tour next month is unattainable for most. Marriage, or the marriage lite of a long-term relationship, is still the most reliable way for the average person to have sex; as these pairings decline, so does the amount of sex people are having.

This is why, contrary to the expectations of sexual liberalism, married churchgoers are having more, and more satisfying, sex. As Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang noted in a 2024 First Things essay, Churchgoing couples report more sex than non-religious couples. Specifically, about two-thirds of husbands and wives who attend religious services together have sex at least once a week, compared to less than half who do not regularly attend together or at all, and couples who attend religious services together also report the greatest sexual satisfaction.⁹ This is probability, not certainty—getting married and going to church is not a sure ticket to sexual paradise—but it is still a marked contrast to the likes of Julian’s sex recession reporting, which depicted a generation that is delaying marriage and children to an unprecedented degree without enjoying the sexual liberation it was given in exchange. As she observed, I was amazed by how many 20-somethings were deeply unhappy with the sex-and-dating landscape; over and over, people asked me whether things had always been this hard.¹⁰ And it is not just that forming and maintaining stable relationships is difficult but that the sex is often terrible.

If there was one thing the sexual revolution was supposed to deliver, it was lots of great sex. Yet it is failing to do so, in part because the casual sexual encounters it encourages are not conducive to satisfying sex. Hookups are a bad sexual teacher. They provide little opportunity or incentive