The early church was radically different from the pagan world around it. Having a community which is strong and markedly distinct from the world he believes…will be “attractive to people in a world where there’s so much darkness and pain and suffering.”

Aaron Renn, whose new book Life in the Negative World was reviewed in an earlier article discussed the need for a re-orientation of the Evangelical world from a strategy of relevance and transformation of society “to being a counterculture” at the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology on Apr. 27. He proposed to do this using Tim Keller’s revision of H. Richard Niebuhr’s “Christ and Culture” model (1950), which Keller provided in his 2012 book Center Church (which concerned church planting). Keller’s revision suggested four approaches of relating the church to the world: “relevance,” “transformation,” “counterculture,” and “two kingdoms.” The two kingdoms approach, distinguishing between a Christian’s duty to the church and to the state, is most identified with Lutheranism, and did not characterize Evangelicalism to a great degree in the twentieth century. It is relevance and transformation that have been the principal Evangelical approaches to American society in the contemporary world.
Relating the Gospel to the Wider World
Relevance, Renn said, “seeks to bring the Kingdom of God, the message of the church, to the affairs of men in their daily life.” Keller found mainline Protestantism to be a relevance strategy, but the seeker sensitive movement also focused on relevance. A megachurch sermon might be concerned with social media use, taking a passage of Scripture or a Biblical principle and applying it to social media. Renn believes that the strategy of cultural engagement (noted in the earlier article on Renn’s book and developed in fair measure by Keller himself) is also basically a relevance strategy. Transformationalism on the other hand seeks to expand the Kingdom of God in the world and thereby transform it into a godly civilization. Renn calls it a “de-facto postmillennial sensibility.” Keller considered the “culture war” or “Religious Right” strategy to be transformationalist. Involvement in politics would be used “to transform the laws and the culture of society to align with God’s law.” He conceded, however, that the cultural engagement strategy sometimes “had some transformationalist aspirations.” These strategies have characterized Evangelicalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
In contrast to these outwardly focused strategies, the Christian counterculture strategy focuses on separation from the world. This strategy is characteristic of Anabaptists, with the Amish as the most extreme example. But monastic life is another example. This writer would add that early twentieth century Protestant fundamentalism had countercultural aspects, especially in its doctrines of separatism. The fundamentalist rejection of vice is another separatist characteristic, discussed by Renn below.
While Renn said he does not believe Evangelicalism should become a “strict counterculture,” it nevertheless needs to “adjust the balance” in the direction of counterculture. This is the reasonable move for a religious group that has become a “moral minority.” He observed that minorities “always have to self-consciously steward the strength and identity of their own community,” and gave early twentieth century Catholicism as an example. Roman Catholicism faced much hostility before the middle of the twentieth century, and public institutions, including especially public schools, where the King James Bible was read, were pervaded by Protestantism. Parish schools, Catholic universities, fraternal societies, and other “infrastructure” was established to sustain Catholic life. While to some extent Protestant fundamentalists created a subculture at the same time, the overculture of elite universities, government, and business remained “basically Protestant.” Liberals and conservatives might disagree on particular Christian doctrines, such as the virgin birth of Christ, but they were agreed on Christian morality.
The Alienation of Mainstream Culture
In this regard, Renn observed that a patriarch of contemporary conservatism, William F. Buckley, caused a scandal in 1950 with his publication of God and Man at Yale, which criticized the university for having abandoning Christianity without acknowledging this. He was attacked as a Catholic who didn’t understand the Protestant institution that he had attended.
At this point in the twenty-first century however, Protestants, and certainly Evangelicals, have lost the nation’s cultural institutions, and are left with “big gap.” On the other hand, Catholics have maintained their institutions (although dissent from Catholic teaching varies since Vatican II), and Catholic intellectual life is maintained in fair measure by lay intellectuals. Evangelical Protestants by contrast take their leading ideas in response to the wider society from pastors and theologians, and today in some measure from Catholic thinkers. But Renn believes that the Evangelical mind continues to be a scandal, without the nourishment that institutions in a strong counterculture would give it.
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Aaron Renn charts the decline of social and legal acceptance of historic Christianity from the 1960s to the present. He identifies three eras of this decline: a “positive world” in which Christianity was still widely favored (1964-1994), a “neutral world” in which Christianity was one acceptable choice among many (1994-2014), and a “negative world” in which Christian faith and morality is seen as a threat to the common good and from which Christians tend to be excluded (2014-present).

The post-communist period, which might reasonably have been a time when religious freedom was secure and unchallenged, has, at least in the twenty-first century, turned into a time of unprecedented challenge in America and the West generally. It is no longer an aggressive atheism threatening from abroad, but direct threats domestically to religious speech and action in Western societies from various liberationist ideologies, which if consistently imposed would destroy historic Christianity (and could similarly be used against other traditional religions).
Faithful Christians in America now understand that our beliefs and practices may be penalized, yet we cannot accommodate sinful requirements. Writer and podcaster Aaron Renn, speaking from his background in management and technology consulting, very helpfully endeavored to give Evangelicals perspective on living faithfully in his First Things article The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism, in February 2022. Recently, he expanded on this article in a new book Life in the Negative World: Confronting Challenges in an Anti-Christian Culture.
Three Worlds, Three Strategies
Renn charts the decline of social and legal acceptance of historic Christianity from the 1960s to the present. He identifies three eras of this decline: a “positive world” in which Christianity was still widely favored (1964-1994), a “neutral world” in which Christianity was one acceptable choice among many (1994-2014), and a “negative world” in which Christian faith and morality is seen as a threat to the common good and from which Christians tend to be excluded (2014-present).
“Culture war,” “seeker-sensitivity,” and “cultural engagement” are strategies Evangelicals developed for reaching out to the positive and neutral worlds but will not work well in the negative world, Renn maintains. The culture war strategy (which was really a response to hedonistic attacks on Christian culture and morality) was rooted in a heartland, fundamentalist base, and assumed widespread public agreement with Christian morality (as the name “Moral Majority” indicated, which Renn notes was somewhat like its secular counterpart, the Silent Majority). Seeker-sensitivity was pioneered by Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Church near Chicago, focused on suburban America, and sought to remove barriers to active Christian and church life, based on research of the preferences of “unchurched” people. Traditional hymns, church buildings, stain-glass windows, etc., were jettisoned in favor of praise choruses, bands, and perhaps a perambulating preacher in blue jeans. This still assumed a positive view of Christian faith and morals by many non-observant Americans.
Cultural engagement was basically a seeker-sensitive strategy for the urban elite culture that began to advance in the late twentieth century. Cultural engagement was keyed to the neutral world, The point was to gain a hearing for the gospel with people who were likely to be highly educated, professional, and open to many different world views, but willing to consider Christianity. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City was the most representative figure of this strategy.
For the negative world, Renn proposes a response similar to Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, emphasizing especially Christian institutional integrity and strength. He maintains that both individuals and institutions must be careful to be faithful to Christian doctrines and precepts to survive in the negative world.
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It is frustrating that there is so little that can be done if the Nigerian government is determined on a policy of slowly eradicating the Christian populations of north and central Nigeria over the years with mass murder, destruction of churches, homes, crops, and demographic replacement with people from northern Muslim tribes.

The persecution of Christians in Nigeria seems to be intensifying. Anyone paying attention is aware that there are continuing reports of people being killed in the north of Nigeria, and its so-called “Middle Belt” of farmland, where the mostly Christian farmers are being killed, their crops destroyed, and villages and homes burnt by radical Islamic groups: Fulani herdsman, Boko Haram, and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). However, Christian holidays are especially likely to be a time for attack, and this past Christmas saw one of the worst attacks yet, the slaughter of 200 Christians in Plateau State in the Middle Belt on December 23 through 25.
Atrocities on Christian Holidays
This attack recalls the Pentecost Sunday attack on St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, in southwest Nigeria in 2022. There 50 people were killed. A video clip of the church with pools of blood on the floor immediately after the attack in this article from LifeSiteNews.com is simply horrific.
The choice of a Christian holiday to attack Christians highlights a key controversy which is raised whenever there is attention to the killing in Nigeria. Is this simply a “farmer/herder” conflict, driven ultimately by economic factors, in particular, desertification of the Sahel (the semi-arid transitional zone south of the Sahara Desert), or is it a basically a religious clash, with Muslims attacking Christians in an effort to seize the property of Christian farmers and Islamize Nigeria? The governor of Plateau state, Caleb Mutfwang clearly stated after the attacks that what is happening in Nigeria is genocide. The word may be overused in our day but does express that what is happening is not a “clash,” or a “conflict,” or “sectarian violence,” all of which terms would indicated two sides fighting, but simply radical Muslim groups attacking Christians with the objective of killing them and seizing their property.
Configuration of the Crisis
As noted by Jeff King, President of International Christian Concern in a video clip interviewing a Nigerian pastor cited in an article last fall, when the British ruled Nigeria, they relied on northern Muslims, and particularly the Fulani tribe (with millions of members across the Sahel) to rule the country. This left northern Muslims in charge of the military and security apparatus, with the result that Nigerian army today is reluctant to act against Islamic terrorists (former President Muhammadu Buhari was himself a Fulani), or is even complicit in attacks, arresting or attacking civilian guards against the violence.
In line with this pattern, TruthNigeria, which attempts to report on ongoing slaughter and negligence of Nigerian authorities stopping it and the Western establishment in recognizing it, reported on January 7 that “Nigerian army soldiers are standing as watchmen for Fulani terrorists who have moved into some of the conquered villages …. The terrorist invaders will prevent the return of the 10,000 displaced residents, the majority of whom are Christians, according to victims and humanitarian aid givers.” Additionally, the army has been arresting the civilian guards who attempt to protect the northern communities from Islamic terrorists. Meanwhile, the attacked villages of Mutfet, Ndun, Mbong, and Yelwa Nono still have no security presence. Faced with enormous criticism from the West regarding the Christmas massacre, the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission has ordered broadcasters in Nigeria to stop reporting on the killing and violence.
Life After an Attack
But for those on the ground in Nigeria, the sudden catastrophe and sorrow at the loss of loved ones, property and livelihood as they were preparing to celebrate Christmas is compounded by the immediate need for food and shelter, and the prospect of how they will rebuild their lives and communities with no assurance (despite promises) of security. A Nigerian pastor who lost his home in the Christmas attack spoke movingly of having lost seven family members as well. Like surely many, many others, he lost everything in his home, “bought foodstuffs, clothing, and whatever. It was a furnished house, but it is burnt, and even the church that is by my side was burnt.”
The hapless residents of northern Nigeria are doing what they can to respond to their plight. The civilian guards, while themselves apparently the occasional targets of the army, are one response. In another response to the Christmas massacre, residents of the affected areas rallied in Jos, the capital of Plateau State.
The displacement of people from devastated and dangerous areas has resulted in multitudes of displaced persons. The linked article above from Barron’s on the most recent attacks also noted that “thousands of people were also displaced in the attacks, which hit mostly Christian villages.” But many others have been displaced as well, as the violence has intensified. Last October it was reported that over two million persons were displaced by the “farmer/herder” conflict in Benue State. (south of Plateau State).
Persistent Government Complicity
Government complicity was discussed in this writer’s previous article on the Nigerian crisis, and seems to be continuing. Reports of the violence not uncommonly implicate the government in what is happening. As noted in my earlier article in September, it is estimated by Vatican News that 52,250 people have been killed in the last 14 years, and 18,000 churches have been set on fire. Such statistics testify either to a government unable or unwilling to stop the violence. The Director of the International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (InterSociety),Emeka Umeagbalasi, has accused the government of encouraging the bloodshed. “The level of violence is expected to continue, and it has continued to rise because the authorities are fueling the crisis,” he said.
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The World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) was established to advance gender ideology as the scientific and professional viewpoint. Any health professional with a different viewpoint is speaking against the professional associations if they give voice to their dissent. Thus, the professionals that distressed parents will turn to will likely recommend the denial of a child’s true sex as the proper treatment.

Gender ideology, the basis of transgenderism, was the topic of two presentations at the recent Southern Evangelical Seminary’s Apologetics Conference in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Jay Richards, Director of the DeVos Center for Religion, Life, and Family at the Heritage Foundation discussed the philosophy itself, while Christian apologist and author Frank Turek, President of CrossExamine.org, discussed its radical inconsistencies and disastrous consequences.
The Fracturing of Marriage and Sex
Richards said that the sexual revolution is “a fracturing of things that are meant to go together.” Today, the dominant culture in practice and law and rhetoric is pulling apart what God intended to go together, and thus “all sorts of bad things are unleashed.” What is pulled apart is “the organic unity of marriage, sex, and the sexual act and childbearing.” Sex and childbearing are held together in traditional Christianity. The sexual revolution pulled these things apart, not only intellectually, but also technologically. Indeed, Richards maintained that the sexual revolution was not possible until the advent of the birth control pill, which made practical the separation of sex and childbearing. He compared this to the Protestant Reformation and the printing press. Advancing the Bible against prevailing religious doctrines and practices was greatly facilitated by the new availability of Bibles and literature supporting the Reformation.
In our day, the smartphone has had a dramatic impact on social relations and behavior. Technology likewise enabled a worldwide shutdown of society in 2020. With the separation of sex from childbearing, marriage is seen more as an affectional relation than the basis of procreation and a family. A 50-state enactment of unilateral (or no-fault) divorce followed. This made a marriage contract easier to break than a business contract. People take these changes “for granted,” but they were “unprecedented though for most of Christian history.” The deregulation of sex resulted in an increase of unwanted pregnancies, which led to a demand for legal abortion, which the Supreme Court decreed in 1973.
These changes, Richards said, were not only in the United States, but worldwide. The coupling of people in marriage “only makes sense” if there is understood to be a “complementary nature of male and female,” and that as a basis for procreation and a family. Without this basis, there is no reason why two people of the same sex might not marry each other. But once same-sex marriage was decreed, “the logic of monogamy fell apart.” There is no reason why a relationship not focused on the union of male and female need be only between two people. Indeed, without the union of male and female being essential for marriage and the family, the way is open to attack the division of humanity into males and females. After the Obergefell decision in 2015, it was as though “everybody had a memo” to start talking about transgenderism. The sexual revolution is “the logical outworking of an original revolutionary idea that was enabled by technology.”
Richards said that there is a difference in people’s ability to comprehend these changes based on age. Baby boomers and “gen Xers” find these changes “so discontinuous” with the world that they knew “that we tend to not quite get what’s being said.” On the other hand “gen Zers” have “sort of been steeped in this stuff.” Young people from many public and even private schools have been “bombarded” by gender ideology for some time, and the new ideas do not seem as strange. Indeed, gender ideology is taught to young children not yet able to read. This is truly radical, because, Richards said, among the things a young child needs to know to “navigate reality” are “the difference between an adult and a kid, and the difference between a boy and a girl.” Because the difference between male and female is so basic, it is important to “queer” or destabilize the beliefs of young children to further the objectives of self-determination and moral autonomy.
Many teens today follow social media “influencers,” who sensationalize the ideas of gender ideology. Early adolescents disturbed by changes to their bodies or psyches are vulnerable to the valorizing of transgenderism, and its basic claim that their bodies are at war with their souls. They are told that with pills and surgery their bodies can be made to conform to their sense of self. This has resulted in a massive increase in the number of minors presenting with “gender dysphoria.” This he defined as “the intense sense of distress and discomfort with your sexed body.” It is not really a false belief about one’s body, but only discomfort with the body one has.
Both sex and gender are several hundred year old words, but starting in the 1960s, academics and other theorists of sex began referring to the biological difference of male and female as sex, and its psychological and social aspects as gender. But this distinction was then replaced by gender ideology as it currently exists, which denies biological sex and distinguishes between “sex assigned at birth” and “gender identity.” Gender identity is supposed to be the “internal sense of our gender.” But this definition defines gender in terms of itself, so that it has no objective meaning. It is claimed that sex based on body parts or structure is only a “social construct… associating certain body parts with stereotypes, called sexes.” The determination of sex when a child is born is thus only an arbitrary assignment. Although it strains credulity to believe that sex determination based on body parts is arbitrary, this is in fact what is being maintained.
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Among the many amicus briefs offered to the Supreme Court, likely the best at answering the claim of stigma mitigation against the constitutional right to free speech was offered by Robert George, professor of law at Princeton University. George compellingly shows that principles established by the Supreme Court recognize the constitutional right to free speech cannot be curtailed in the interest of hurt feelings, however strong the hurt is.

The 303 Creative vs. Elenis case, which will presumably be announced near the end of June, is one of the most crucial, perhaps the most crucial case to be decided by the Supreme Court in the war between sexual liberation and religious liberty. It is being analyzed by the court as a free speech case, although freedom of religion and conscience really lie behind it, and was reviewed by this writer in two articles late last year, one before, and one after oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
As noted particularly in the second article, the free speech claim against requiring the proprietor of 303 Creative, Lori Smith, to provide web design for same-sex weddings is strong. Providing web design for same-sex weddings is now required by common court interpretation of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA). But free speech for what is obviously expressive behavior seemed to be strongly defended by a majority of justices at the December 5 oral arguments.
As the secular and religious left has attacked the Judeo-Christian tradition in recent years, both in law and in society, with antidiscrimination laws and (where possible) speech restrictions, the Supreme Court has defended both, although free speech is much stronger in current jurisprudence. While the Left has condemned this as favoritism to the Right, it is actually simply the straightforward application of the law, as was noted more than a year ago by Mark Rienzi of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and allows Americans with sharply different opinions to live together.
Using Social Stigma Claims to Overcome Free Speech
Faced with a court intent on protecting freedom of religion and speech, the Left has turned to the claim that civil rights law, and behind it, the Fourteenth Amendment, mandates pro-active government measures to remove social stigma. This is really a very blatant effort to gain what social conservatives have complained about for years, the claim of a right not to be offended. It was recently discussed by well-known researcher in sexual behavior and the family, Mark Regnerus, of the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture in a Public Discourse article.
The challenge to defenders of free speech in the wider society is daunting. The majority of Americans now accept both homosexuality and same-sex marriage, and as Regnerus notes, “All of the major American medical, sociological, and psychological professional organizations endorse LGBTQ claims, including gender medicine for minors, an industry now buttressed by over 400 clinics.” When one considers that ten or twenty years ago, many of these very intelligent people would never have thought of endorsing the sexual mutilation of minors, and their professional associations (if not the majority of practitioners) advance it today as “science,” the extent of cultural conquest is staggering. To be against LGBT claims from the standpoint of common sense (and certainly religious belief) is to be against science. The American Psychological Association presented an amicus brief in support of the State of Colorado’s claims of a right to compel speech in requiring Lori Smith use her artistic talents to provide same-sex wedding web design.
Regnerus pointed out that this situation proves Chief Justice John Roberts was correct in his doubt, expressed in his dissent from the same-sex marriage decision, Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015), that the promise in the decision of free speech protection for opponents of same-sex marriage would be honored. Roberts said the majority decision “graciously suggests that religious believers may continue to ‘advocate’ and ‘teach’ their views of marriage.” However, the APA claims that social stigma adversely affects the health of LGBT identifying persons. It proposes denying free speech to Lori Smith by requiring compelled speech. When this bridgehead is established, speech against homosexuality (or silence in place of approval), could become illegal in many situations, as is the case in Canada and other Western countries.
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Both the PCA and the CRC have made godly decisions in line with Scripture (although at different places in the struggle for Biblical morality); continued courage and perseverance against sin will be necessary to remain and become ever more faithful churches of God.

Christians have a duty to obey God in all circumstances, regardless of the cost. This doesn’t change even if there is no institutional support, as this writer discussed several years ago. But it is better if we have a church faithful to the Word of God to be part of. In our day, faithfulness is measured by fidelity to the sexual morality revealed in Scripture. When a denomination makes its decision on this, it decides everything – whether it will continue in faithfulness to God and his gospel of salvation from sin, or whether it will follow the world and its gospel of self-actualization and gratification.
Summer is the time when Protestant denominations’ governing bodies commonly meet, and just as this has been a momentous summer for the Supreme Court, so it has been for three denominations considered Evangelical in recent decades, which met and took decisive action in one direction or another.
Other than certain differences on questions of divorce and remarriage, sexual morality was not much of an issue for churches before the sexual revolution. Even here, the standard of divorceless opposite-sex monogamy is clear from Scripture, and the general acceptance of this by a Christian society made any admonitions to sexual purity focus on avoiding the temptations of fornication and adultery. Commands against sodomy in both testaments were strong and clear, and to common sense admitted of no exceptions.
Beginning with the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the advent of a movement for homosexual liberation, it became necessary to make binding pronouncements against homosexuality (although to previous generations the Biblical condemnations would have been quite sufficient for church discipline). What then followed was denominations with formal statements against homosexual practice  and growing minorities in vocal dissent, moved by the larger society and activist groups within the denominations. Eventual formal acceptance of homosexuality today comes in the form of formally accepting same-sex marriage. Those who disagree either leave the church or find a personal justification for remaining.
More than a year ago, this writer reviewed an excellent defense of opposite-sex only monogamy by a pastor in the Mennonite Church U.S.A., Darrin W. Synder Belousek, who offered a Biblical defense of opposite-sex only monogamy independent of the Biblical condemnations of homosexuality. Synder Belousek was concerned about the drift of his denomination toward the acceptance of same-sex marriage. Earlier the denomination’s largest conference, the Lancaster Mennonite Conference, had left the denomination, concerned about the increasing acceptance of homosexuality.
Late this spring, as was reported at the beginning of last month, the Mennonite Church U.S.A. formally accepted same-sex marriage, and signaled an utter rejection of Christian sexual morality in effectively apologizing for its previous Biblical standard, calling for repentance from it. Typical of the current homosexual/transgender apologetic, it effectively claims that the pain and humiliation Biblical morality causes is sufficient to establish that it is oppressive, setting aside God’s absolute authority, and Jesus’ call to accept the painful, narrow gate to life.
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The creative class and the affective revolution now “do the work of soul healing and education.” This complex, along with global capitalism, forms the “hypermodern cultural system.” If it can succeed in taking full control of the human rights doctrine “we will have a morality legislated globally.” This possible future for Christianity in the world, he said, is “dark.”

Guilherme de Carvalho, a Brazilian Baptist theologian and founder of the Brazilian Christians in Science Association (ABC2), discussed the impact of the “affective revolution,” which focuses on emotional life and has powered identity politics, and its impact on law, general culture, and thus Christian witness at the recent L’Abri Conference in Rochester, Minnesota.
The revolutionary turn to subjectivity has been reviewed at some length by the L’Abri Fellowship. It has had a major impact on the contemporary world, and Latin America is no exception. But it also has deep roots in European civilization. While the West, especially since the Enlightenment, is supposedly is “founded on reason,” it has also long been an “empire of sentiment.” From this aspect of the Enlightenment, we get “sentimental man.”
De Carvalho said that in the recent past, he was “very much focused on fighting rationalism, new atheism.” This was certainly true of Christian apologetics in general. More recently, particularly in the last decade, he “felt something changing.” He “felt that the frontier of Christian apologetics was moving from epistemology to ethics.” A “main theme” has become “happiness.” There is a “disengagement from the moral universe.” This is done “in the interest of self-expression and well being.” This has become “normal currency.”
Behind and before this change, he said, was a much deeper change that happened from about 1950 to about 1970. This was the mixture of “modern hypercapitalism” with a unfettered sense of “how to feel love, and to organize” one’s emotional state. He called it a “second individualistic revolution.” The idea of  “emotional intelligence” emerged in the 1990s, and it has been normalized since then. By 2011, emotional intelligence tests were more important than IQ tests, de Carvalho claimed. Teachers have tests to “assess the emotional realities of students.” Another development is “positive psychology.” This focuses on individual and social well being. He sees some good in this last item. There is also “affective computing,” which was started in 1995, and attempts to take human psychological reality into account.
The emphasis on feeling rather than thought has also led to a “narrowing of the human/animal gap.” Here he referred to the atheist Princeton ethicist Peter Singer. Singer emphasizes the emotions, and therefore the “interests,” of animals. This then gives animals “rights” as a result of their “feelings.” This narrowing the human/animal gap is also found in “pop culture,” he said. He noted that Pope Francis has referred to the preference some people have to pets over children.
De Carvalho referred to The Transformation of Intimacy, by Anthony Giddens. It proposes an egalitarian “pure relation as a description of modern love.” People stay in such relationships only because they get “emotional rewards” from it. The relationship can be terminated at will. This, according to de Carvalho, was proposed as “a new standard for modern love.” Sociologist Mark Regnerius used Giddens’ idea to research sexual activities and relationships in America. Giddens “even recommended” Regnerius’ work. Regnerius “pointed out the problems” the new egalitarian and consensual sex ethic has for women and children.
The affective revolution has affected family law in Brazil. The idea is that “the point of the family is to make each member of the family happy.” It is a “new foundation” for the family, which has changed Brazilian law and jurisprudence. The concept of family is changed “without any reference to kinship.” Any group of people who share living space “and have affections, this is a family.” It might be added that this effectively undermines both marriage and parental authority. A marriage which is unhappy can obviously be ended at will (as is now legally the case, but certainly not in Christian doctrine), and it appears that the state can terminate a parent/child relationship if the child is unhappy with it.
But, he said, there are “things that are worse” in Brazil. There is being advanced the doctrine of “affective rights.” This involves saying that marriage is not about rights and duties, but “affectivity.” This resulted in the Brazilian Supreme Court mandating same sex civil unions in 2011. It has led to a “politics of self-regard.” It can easily be in conflict with the Christian doctrine of sin, which focuses on duty and responsibility, and aims at inducing guilt and repentance. It appears similar or the same as the LGBT claim of “dignity” for deeply felt desires and behavior. As this writer has often noted, this cannot be consistently applied. There can be no right-not-to-be-offended, which is what the “politics of self-regard” would seem to amount to.
The overall effect, de Carvalho said, of “affective rights” is make people turn inward. People are guided by “fear, and gut feelings.” This is happening both on “the left and the right.” He said that “democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling in ways that cannot be ignored or reversed.” He referred to commentary of columnist David Brooks of the New York Times, regarding the business and professional “creative class.” According to Brooks, the creative class has been emerging since around the year 2000. Their ideals are “to be smart, to be original.” The really important thing for this class “is to be creative.” This class is “connected to the tech industry,” and is also “connected to gentrification in … big cities.”
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