Where is the new sexuality heading? (Hint: What’s  the natural conclusion of postmodern ideology?)

The postmodern world begins its ascent onto the world scene by denying the concept of a metanarrative (an assertion which is itself a metanarrative, of course). Thus, postmodernism rejects the claims of Darwinian ideology as well as Judeo-Christian theism. The application of postmodernism in the area of human sexuality means there is no essentialism, there is no design or purpose in our sexuality; postmoderns argue we are born without sexual identity.

Postmodernism’s ideal sexuality is androgyny, literally “male and female in one.” The sexual order of creation is replaced with an indeterminate uncertainty. In the creation order, lower forms of life such as paramecium and amoebas are androgynous. Higher forms of life have greater design, complexity, and differentiation. But the modern and postmodern worldviews deny a transcendent Creator, therefore there is no transcendent order, no transcendent sexuality. Feminine or masculine nature, in this view, are merely social constructs. Many moderns reject transcendent sexuality; postmoderns take it even further, arguing that there is not even a sexuality of male and female. To move culture in this direction, the postmoderns have eliminated the language of biology—i.e. “sex”—for the socially constructed term “gender.”

Solomon observed that “there is nothing new under the sun.” Today’s “postmodernism” is the ancient pre-Christian paganism. In today’s language it is the new (neo)-paganism. In the past it was the Jews and the Christians who snatched human sexuality from pagan culture. Prior to Judeo-Christian monotheism, the world was largely animistic. Mother Nature and her creatures were worshipped.

The ethics that derived from paganism assigned little or no moral constraint to human sexuality. In fact if there was an ethic at all, it was license.  People could have multiple partners. They could engage with the same sex. Pedophilia (sex with children) was normal in some societies as was bestiality (sex with other mammals). If moderns retain any abhorrence to bestiality and pedophilia it is because of the memory of the radical nature of human sexuality – one man and one woman in a covenantal marriage – brought to the world by the Jews and the Christians. As Judeo-Christian theism becomes a distant memory in the West, human sexuality is again devolving toward pagan practices.

Postmoderns have influenced the language of sexuality. It may be fair to say they are winning the vocabulary battle. Having denied transcendent masculine and feminine, now they are trying to deny biological facts. Doctors and midwives are still delivering girls and boys, but postmoderns want to eliminate even that distinction. They deny biology and are anti-science.

As the culture devolved from the higher transcendent realities of Judeo-Christian theism to the smaller world of Darwinism, with its rejection of transcendent reality, two words have gained prominence: lesbian (L) and gay (G).

In the twilight of transcendent sexuality—i.e., love that is more than mere biology—a brand-new concept appeared—that some people are born with a propensity to sexual relations/romance with persons of their same sex. “LG” was formed and quickly became fashionable. The behavior was not new. Ancient pagan cultures practiced homosexuality … and many other behaviors that were not considered deviant in that society until the rise of the Judeo-Christian worldview. As reality took hold, the covenantal, one man-one woman marriage became the “gold standard” for human sexuality and the nature of the family. Now, something has changed; a concept of homosexuality as an identity, and the societal recognition of such, has taken root.

Pagan sexuality is the new normal

But the new normal is not merely “LG.” The new normal now taking shape is pagan sexuality.

As the modern world gave way to neo-pagan illusion, the language of “gender” replaced the language of “sex.” This opened the door to use language to determine who and what we are. “Homosexual” became “gay,” and in a stroke, a practice forbidden by human nature, by virtually all societies, and by the scriptures of both Jews and Christians, was unencumbered with judgmental overtones. In the postmodern framework of no-holds-barred, indeterminate human sexuality, gender is boundless. You may be anything you want to be, you may do anything you want to do, with full impunity.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is the godfather of androgyny. Foucault denied both the transcendence of Judeo-Christian theism, and the metanarrative of Darwinism. Both affirm the notion of objective truth. Monotheists worship the God from whom all objective truth derives. Evolutionists live off the memory of the Judeo-Christian worldview that the universe is ordered and rational man has the ability to discover the laws and order in the universe. Or to put this differently, evolutionary theory that life has come about from non-life by chance, leaves no room for the necessary assumptions needed for science. But Foucault goes further, denying objective truth altogether. Truth is subjective; we make truth for ourselves by the words we use. “Truth” is a social construct.

Thus, for Foucault, sexuality is elastic. In his radical work on Queer Theory, Foucault argues that one’s sexual and gender identity is a personal construct. Foucault calls the body an “inscribed surface of events” (Foucault, 1984: 83). Postmodern feminist Pippa Brush writes, “The body becomes plastic, inscribed with gender and cultural standards. … The constitution of the body rests in its inscription; the body becomes the text which is written upon it and from which it is indistinguishable ….”

Foucault floated an idea. And ideas often take root in a society. They move from the theoretical and philosophical, through culture, into institutions, such as legal codes, and then into the common life of the community. As we have written elsewhere, this shift in the legal code culminated when Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority in Planned Parenthood vs Casey (1992), stated that the fundamental principle of our liberty was “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This phrase invented a new principle, the right of each individual to define themselves before the law.

Historically we may look at the simple flow of sexual history this way:

– In creation, God establishes the one man-one woman covenantal relationship and the children born out of this relationship as the foundation for societies.

– When human beings rebelled against God, they no longer knew who they were. In fact, they lost any sense of the creation order. As they worship pagan-animistic gods, their sexual preferences and practices changed. There were no moral boundaries on sexuality. Fornication, adultery, homosexuality, pedophilia, and bestiality became the new normal.

– The Jews and later their Christian cousins re-established the biblical “gold standard” for human sexuality. They were, to use Dennis Prager’s term, “deviant from the pagan norm.” It was the Jews and the Christians that restored to the world the creation purpose of sexuality and family that tamed the passions of pagan sexuality and allowed for the development of Western culture.

– Now in the postChristian and postmodern era of Neo-Paganism, we are losing our ontological identity (of creation) for a new social-constructed identity. Gender is elastic and now boundless pagan  sexual behavior is becoming the norm again.

… to be continued

– Darrow Miller with Gary Brumbelow

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