The Sexual Gospel

A Review of Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All by Nathanael Blake

The rolling revolution of sexual liberation is accumulating a growing number of discontents. Or, as Nathanael Blake calls them, victims. Blake persuasively argues that the sexual revolution has failed, both on the individual and cultural levels. Moreover, he demonstrates how the growing dissatisfaction with the sexual landscape, as well as the longing people have for something better, points toward what Christianity has upheld for thousands of years. This book is perfect for understanding our moment. It not only provides a natural-law case for why the sexual revolution fails; it goes further by holding up the Christian alternative, which has revolutionized the world before and could do so again.

Documented Failures

Victims of the Revolution compiles mountains of data to show the failures of the sexual revolution on a variety of fronts, from metrics of personal happiness to family formation to actual satisfaction in and frequency of sexual activity. The promises of free love objectified women and shoehorned them into a template of male sexuality, while also drawing men away from commitment and virtue and towards sexual barbarism. Add into the mix online pornography, gender ideology, abortion, contraception, and artificial reproductive technologies, and we have a recipe for the societal conditions we now are facing.

Blake makes an intriguing case that the sexual revolution is a logical outworking of liberal individualism in the sexual sphere. If an individual is autonomous and sovereign in the political realm and in daily life, then why not in the bedroom, too? And, as many have argued, what’s the big deal what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own bedrooms? But as Blake documents, it actually is a very big deal with very public consequences that can dissolve the fabric of human society and culture.

The More Beautiful Alternative

The last few years have seen a barrage of books in this genre, questioning the sexual revolution from a variety of perspectives. But what sets this book somewhat apart is the way that Blake puts all his cards on the table for Christianity. Throughout he paints a compelling and beautiful alternative picture of what true sexual expression aligned with God’s design can look like. In employing natural law and Scriptural arguments, his case has broad appeal.

In Christianity we have a full celebration of the goodness of human sexuality properly ordered in accord with our nature. When Christianity burst onto the scene in the ancient world, it was indeed a sexual revolution in the best sense of the term, one where women were honored as full persons and men were called to honorable standards of fidelity and devotion to one wife. In the pagan atmosphere of sexual promiscuity and male instrumentalization of female (and male) bodies for sexual pleasure—whether they were slaves, prostitutes, or spouses—Christianity’s message of male-female dignity and holy sexuality was truly freeing. And most of all, the Christian sexual ethic grounded in covenant love provided a stable setting for raising children, thus fostering overall societal flourishing.

Now, in the wake of our culture’s enthronement of sexual expression and transgression, Christianity’s message can be freeing and stabilizing once again.