I have already discussed the new book by Os Guinness: Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds (Kildare, 2024). This important volume by the Christian intellectual and social commentator is quite significant indeed. In it he argues that Western civilisation is clearly a crossroads. Early on he defines what this entails:
A civilizational moment is a critical transition phase in the rise, course, and decline of a civilization when a civilization loses its decisive connection with the dynamic that inspired it. Such a moment must then issue in one of three broad options: a renewal of the dynamic that inspired the civilization in the first place, a successful replacement of the original dynamic by another, or the decline of the civilization and perhaps the birth of a new and different civilization later in time and elsewhere in the world. In sum, the issue for a civilization in a civilizational moment is its vision of ultimate reality: Is the civilization in living touch with the ideas, ideals, and inspiration that created it in the first place and that it needs to continue to flourish? Or, with its roots severed, is it destined to decline and die? (p. 30)
He offers four key flashpoints where this is occurring:
The Red Wave: Radical Marxism
The Rainbow Wave: The Sexual Revolution
The Black Wave: Radical Islamism
The Gold Wave: Corrupt Elitism
I have previously penned pieces on his chapters about Islam and Marxism:
Chapter 5 on the sexual revolution is worth looking at more closely and quoting from as well. He begins by saying this:
The Rainbow Wave is the broad combination of trends that make up the sexual revolution, and the different elements that presently comprise the ever-expanding and increasingly self-contradictory “LGBTQ+” movement. Many people think that the sexual revolution is recent, and simply about the long overdue liberation from the supposedly uptight sexual and moral traditions of the past. They see it as the result of the sexual “Big Bang” of the 1960s, and therefore the child of Hugh Hefner, Playboy magazine, the Pill, and permissive sex. It certainly includes all of that, but in fact, the roots of the sexual revolution lie much deeper in the ferment of the French Revolution. The roots are ideological rather than technological, and their endgame is far more radical. In essence, the sexual revolution presents a vision of human life and society that is nothing less than the ancient and impossible dream of complete human autonomy, the total liberation of human desire, and a celebration of sexual freedom in all its forms and with no limits. Thus, the sexual revolution represents the deliberate subversion of 3000 years of civilization and its constraints. (p. 109)
As to the overall theme of the book, Guinness writes: “In terms of our civilizational moment, the sexual revolution is an open assault on the Bible’s view of sexuality, which replaced the pagan view that had been dominant before the rise of the West.” (p. 111)
He looks in some detail at those warring against biblical anthropology and sexuality, and discusses how so many intellectuals and influential leaders ran with the mantra that sexual libertinism was somehow the royal road to freedom. He assesses some of the leading figures here, such as Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Kinsey, Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault.
They all wanted a world without limits, especially when it comes to all things sexual. Ethical, legal and natural limits were spurned, and the push was on for open slather with any and all forms of sexuality. Pursuing pleasure at all costs was the rallying cry, and forget about personal responsibility and self-control.
As Guinness explains:
The notion of social construction and deconstruction rules out creation and means the elimination of all God-given distinctions, demarcations and limits. For Jews and Christians, creation-based distinctions mean limits, limits mean both the fulfilment within the limits and the possibility of transgression through flouting the limits, and transgression means freedom in the short-term, but chaos and loss of freedom in the long term. For the sexual revolution, in open contrast, there are no created distinctions, as all is constructed and not created. So, there are no inherent limits, there is no transgression where there are no limits to be transgressed, and the short-term result is undreamed of freedom of all kinds. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, if God is dead, everything is permitted. You can be as free as you desire to be. The only limits are the limits of your own thinking. (p. 118)
That is the stuff of dreamland. Hedonism and sexual anarchy might sound neat, but they can never go far in the real world. Things always get messy. That is why unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, countless abortions, broken families, and fractured societies are now the norm throughout the West.
Our Civilizational Moment: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worldsby Guinness, Os (Author)
And the boundaries – at least the few of them that are still left – keep being challenged:
Inevitably, the outcome of these liberation movements grows increasingly illiberal, both in terms of the movements themselves and in terms of the ever-greater aggression towards any who disagree with them. The dissent starts slowly but gathers speed. At first, all that each movement asks for is toleration and acceptance, but then a forced celebration of its new lifestyle, and in the end, legal penalties for those whose faith and conscience see things differently from them. This old strategy is now being harnessed to promote pedophilia. Few people notice when the opening cry is for “children’s liberation” and then for a crusade for “international children’s rights.” Isn’t everything a matter of liberation and rights today, so why not children too? But somehow, the proposed liberation includes the right to certain “sexual freedoms,” and then to the lowering of the age of consent across the world. (pp. 120-121)
He explains this sad regression in terms of these five downward steps:
First, legal admissibility…
Second, moral acceptance…
Third, social aggression…
Fourth, global affirmation…
Finally, and fatefully, global authoritarianism… (p. 121-123)
He carefully looks at each step, and then goes on to say:
When the lone individual is the primary concern, the goal of revolutionary liberation is the elimination of all limiting ties that restrict the newly autonomous individual – whether ties of religion, tradition, family, associations, social expectations, and prohibition such as limits on abortion. All limits must go. All mediating institutions can be dispensed with. The autonomous individual must be liberated and left unhampered. (p. 131)
Yes, and the endgame of all this is the total eradication of the Judeo-Christian worldview, replaced by autonomous, decadent and utterly unrestrained mankind:
Yet this smashing of the categories is not the ultimate goal of the sexual revolution. Its spiritual elite have a higher goal in mind: to strive towards ultimate human harmony beyond all categories. In aiming for this state, the elite revolutionaries are attempting to return both paganism and sexual androgyny to their primitive pedestal and to license every possible type of sexuality as an expression of freedom – with polyamory now half in the door and pedophilia and zoophilia (or bestiality) well on the way. Starting by elevating androgyny and unisex, and by erasing all differences between the male and female as socially constructed, and then all other inherited distinctions, the revolutionaries released sexual options to be as free, fluid, and infinitely variable as individuals might choose, so Freud’s “polymorphous perversity” with a vengeance, and homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, polyamory, transgenderism, trans-speciesism, cross-dressing, drag queen culture, puppy play, and the like. This is how, Reich said, the sexual revolutionaries were out to subvert thousands of years of “patriarchal” societies (including the four thousand years of both the Jewish roots and the Christian flowering). (p. 133)
He continues:
At its deepest, this vision is religious and not secular, as many gurus have made clear. It looks far beyond immediate sexual freedom. Its supreme goal is to erase all distinction and fuse all opposites, especially between male and female, in order to attain the primordial cosmic wholeness and unity that has long been sought by pagan priests and shamans. Sexual androgyny is the key to this quest for both the religious and the secular….
The revolutionaries knew, of course, that to win, they would have to win by overcoming all who prized the differences between male and female—above all, three major enemies: the patriarchal family and the Jewish and Christian faiths—and therefore enforced the rigid straightjacket of sexual stereotypes (“gender fundamentalism”). The revolutionaries would sideline parents, for instance, by introducing sex education, drag queen shows, a general sexualization of women, and sexual grooming of children at the earliest age, making an end run around parents and parental responsibilities. “We’re coming for your children,” as the drag queen shows now boast. And in more and more areas, the idea grew that the state, not parents, should be the authority over children, with schools now hiding critical information from parents. (pp. 133-134)
The full-on sexualisation of children, the assault on marriage, the radical homosexual and trans agendas, the ready access to porn in all its forms, and the reductionism that says we are all really just animals, are all working together to destroy Judaism and Christianity. And in the end, it will mean the destruction of what it means to be human – and of the West itself.
The sexual revolutionaries have a lot to answer for. And we can be grateful for voices like that of Guinness for sounding the alarm.
Returning to the situation in Genesis 1:2 before God established limits and boundaries.
Yes John, even before the Fall God had put limits and restrictions in place.