Sex and the post-Christian right

In early 2016, Ross Douthat, the lone conservative columnist at the New York Times, tweeted, “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.” Almost a decade later, he continues to be vindicated, as demonstrated by his colleague Jessica Grose, who fears for her daughters’ future as some on the right embrace Andrew Tate, an online personality and alleged sex trafficker. Officials in the Trump administration reportedly helped get Tate and his brother out of Romania, where they face serious criminal charges.

Grose views Tate as emblematic of a misogynistic cultural shift, and worries that her daughters “will not be treated as fully human by the men and boys in their lives. And that to get along, more and more women and girls will accept that treatment. I am most upset by the idea of my daughters dating boys who belittle them in ways big and small and, in the worst case scenario, abuse them.” She is correct that Tate is loathsome, and the shots she takes at his enablers on the right are justified. And though she may exaggerate it, a foul misogynist vibe has taken root in parts of the right, especially among alienated and bitter men who spend too much time online and not enough in church.

Like Grose, I do not want my daughters to live in a culture where male status comes at women’s expense, and male satisfaction via female degradation. But Grose’s liberalism is a dead end. Most obviously, liberals cannot protect the interests of women and girls because they have spent years pretending not even to know what a woman is. However, even if we ignore liberalism’s deconstruction of the reality of womanhood, the heart of liberalism’s failure to care for woman is revealed in Grose’s lament that “Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to … abortion medication in the next four years?”

I struggle to think of anything more horrifying than my daughters killing their own children, but that is what Grose prioritizes for hers. She is rightly repulsed by the domination and exploitation of Tate and his followers, but she champions the violent domination of abortion. This illustrates why liberal feminism has failed women, and will continue to fail them. Abortion treats female fecundity as a malformation, a curse to be violently ended. It responds to the natural asymmetry of human sexuality and reproduction with bloodshed, rather than loving solidarity. Instead of a unity of love between mother, father, and child, there is a lethal battleground of competing selfishness.

The sexual revolution required abortion on demand as the price of adult sexual license and relational autonomy. But though commitment to sexual liberation is now the core of liberalism, it has not delivered on its promises. Instead of being a wellspring of human flourishing rooted in sexual pleasure and authenticity, the triumph of the sexual revolution has, on average, left Americans lonelier, unhappier, and even having less (and less satisfying) sex.

This is because selfish pleasure-seeking is intrinsically self-defeating. We are meant for love, and find joy and fulfillment in committed, deep relationships, whereas selfishness often sabotages even the pursuit of short-term pleasures. And so it should not surprise us that it is married conservative churchgoers who tend to be the most content—and even to report more regular sex and more sexual satisfaction.

Christian marriage is the antidote to the toxicity of Tate and his ilk and to Grose’s lethal liberal feminism, both of which only worsen the current relational wasteland. Grose’s liberal feminism and Tate’s post-Christian right reject love because they reject the solidarity and selflessness that love requires of us. Both are therefore immiserating. Tate preaches a loveless life to lonely young men, and though Grose may take solace in the number of young women who identify as feminists, these liberal young women are disproportionately miserable. Worse still, these two false ideals feed off of each other, as the sexes are set against each other in a cycle of enmity.

Amid this ruined romantic landscape, Christians can model a better way to live, one that is rooted in love and our nature as male and female. We cannot escape the reality of embodiment. Men and women are different, and we must strive to understand these differences and their implications rightly, and to respond to them in love, rather than trying to pretend the differences away, or turning them into self-serving justifications for domination and exploitation.

In contrast to the competing selfishness of liberal feminism and online misogyny, we must show how men and women are meant to live in solidarity and complementarity. Those virtuous principles set the foundation for true respect.