“The Worst Thing”

Sunday, July 30, 2023

Over the past century, the world has seen some truly awful events: the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, the Soviet gulags and forced starvation of millions in Ukraine, the euphemistically named “Great Leap Forward” in China, which killed far more people than other contenders in an offering to the deified State.  We could include the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which brought an end to World War Two, at the awful cost of up to 200,000 civilians killed, and a horrifying door opened that we cannot now close.  Perhaps we should include the COVID-19 pandemic, although it will be many years before most of the world can discuss that issue honestly and dispassionately.  Hiding in the middle of all these more obvious evils is one that we don’t often give its due: the invention and widespread adoption of the hormonal birth control pill.

It’s not that birth control is inherently evil—although there are serious ethical concerns with most forms.  But “the pill” separated, in practice if not in principle, sexual acts from their plausible, natural result—reproduction. It enticed the world to stop seeing sex as a mutual expression of love and desire between a man and woman who recognize they may be creating a new life together.  It fooled the world into instead seeing sex as only a means of gratifying one’s own fleshly lusts.  It’s no accident that the history of the pill is tightly intertwined with the history of the 20^th century’s sexual revolution.

Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife and perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his. So whenever he went in to his brother’s wife he would waste the semen on the ground, so as not to give offspring to his brother. And what he did was wicked in the sight of the Lord, and he put him to death also.

(Genesis 38.8-10)

People have botched sexual ethics nearly as long as there have been people.  The desire for sexual gratification without consequence has been central to the story.  But as with all human solutions to spiritual problems, the pill did not address the core issue of slavery to selfish desires, and instead tried to prevent the more obvious results of gratifying them.  The idea was to allow those who have no business procreating, to have their fun without consequence—leading to fewer fatherless kids, in the end.  So, what happened?  Fatherlessness skyrocketed.

There are plenty of other birth control methods, of course, but due to the intersection of effectiveness, convenience, the illusion of ethical clarity, and, shall we say, user experience, the pill was a revolution in itself, reinforcing the lie that sex should be about each individual’s own gratification.  In the popular conscience, sex is now divorced from obvious, life-changing consequences, because of the pill.

This was driven, we should note, by Thomas Malthus’ fear that there were just too many people for the world to sustain—in the late 18^th century, when the world had roughly one eighth of its current population.  Many people latched onto this idea in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the eugenicist bigot Margaret Sanger (who founded Planned Parenthood, by the way—there’s a rabbit hole, if you don’t already know).  Among other things, she was a leading voice in pushing for solutions to the pesky problem of procreation.  She preferred sterility, at least for poor people.  But what did God say?

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”

(Genesis 9.1)

Sadly, Sanger’s attitude won over society, but instead of diminishing the number of kids in less-than-ideal situations, it simply abolished responsibility and excused sin, bringing about more of the problems it promised to prevent!  Consequently, western sexual ethics are broken today.  In the absence of God’s rules, the sexual landscape has shifted to pornography, hookups, sex trafficking, and an ever-increasing number of similarly sterile “alternative lifestyles,” to the point where manhood and womanhood are no longer clearly defined in the popular conscience.

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”

(Matthew 19.4-6)

Meanwhile, marriage rates decline, couples have fewer children, the WHO estimates that about 73 million babies are aborted each year worldwide, and women’s self-reported “happiness” is at an all-time low.  The sexual revolution, which promised enlightenment and joy, has led to misery, despair, and self-centered hatred toward the innocent.  The answer to all of this isn’t in more and further degraded sex, promiscuity, and turning a generation of children into eunuchs.  The answer, broadly, isn’t in celibacy, either.  It’s not even in getting married, enjoying each other immensely, and having lots of kids, although that’s closer to the mark.  Really, the answer is in finding your sense of purpose in life, through Christ.

Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

        Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

(Ephesians 5.24-28)

Jeremy Nettles

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