Mary Eberstadt’s new book, “Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited,” agues, not only has the sexual revolution been disastrous for American society, politics, and churches, but it has become a simulacrum of a religion, with its own dogmas, creeds, and saints. One of the most arresting substories of Eberstadt’s book is how the sexual revolution — and its celebration of contraceptive sex — resulted in the exact opposite of its promoters’ promises. Instead of reducing abortion, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, and fatherlessness, it accelerated them. Eberstadt cites a 2015 study that found contraception encourages sexual encounters and relationships that would not have happened without it.

In the days leading up to Texas federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling on a lawsuit seeking to revoke U.S. government approval of abortion drug mifepristone, the Washington Post ran a front-page feature (read: hit piece) on him. It is not difficult to intuit that authors Caroline Kitchener and Ann E. Marimow wrote the article to undermine Kacsmaryk’s credibility by painting him as a religious zealot whose rulings are influenced by his adherence to “biblical scripture” (their bizarre phrase, not mine), rather than a careful, unbiased consideration of American jurisprudence.
It’s unsurprising the dogmatically pro-abortion WaPo would run such a piece. But what is curious is that WaPo ran the article despite having so little ammunition to support their not-so-subtle thesis. Among the evidence weighed against Kacsmaryk includes that he was raised in a pro-life Christian family; he served on the board of the pro-life organization Christian Homes and Family Services; and he “prays often … and is constantly rereading the Bible.” Beware those Bible-reading (excuse me, “biblical scripture”-reading) federal judges!

Besides proving the embarrassing religious ignorance of leftist corporate media (the piece went through at least three rounds of edits, for goodness’ sake), the WaPo feature also demonstrates something else: the pervasiveness of the fruits of the sexual revolution over our culture, especially that of our secular elites.

In that sense, the response of the Washington Post — and, for that matter, all institutions of the secular left — to the fallout from the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson ruling adds further credence to Mary Eberstadt’s new book, “Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited.” For, Eberstadt argues, not only has the sexual revolution been disastrous for American society, politics, and churches, but it has become a simulacrum of a religion, with its own dogmas, creeds, and saints.
The Exploitation of Women
One of the most arresting substories of Eberstadt’s book is how the sexual revolution — and its celebration of contraceptive sex — resulted in the exact opposite of its promoters’ promises. Instead of reducing abortion, out-of-wedlock births, divorce, and fatherlessness, it accelerated them. Eberstadt cites a 2015 study that found contraception encourages sexual encounters and relationships that would not have happened without it.
“In other words, when couples use contraception, they agree to sex when pregnancy would be a problem,” the study’s author argued. The frequent consequence of that choice, unsurprisingly, has been more abortions.

Contraception, as much as it has “empowered” women to delay or avoid pregnancy, has also enabled men to avoid the responsibilities of fatherhood through what sociologist Mark Regnerus called “Cheap Sex” in his 2017 book. Economist Timothy Reichart in 2010 examined data from the 1960s onward that showed “the contraceptive revolution has resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth and power from women and children to men.”

How? By creating a “prisoner’s dilemma” in which women are encouraged to “enter the sex market and remain there for as long as possible,” even though the ultimate result of this will be less happiness for them, as well as increasing the likelihood of divorce, infidelity, and the desire for abortion.

Read More
Related Posts:

Written by T. M. Suffield |
Monday, October 3, 2022
We need God to unsettle us, to make us dissatisfied with anything but Jesus, and with anything but the age of come. This unsettled longing for an age to come is what the Bible calls joy. It, strangely enough, tends to make contented people, because God satisfies.

There is a gift from God that we do not want. If we’re honest with ourselves, I suspect there are many gifts from God that we don’t want. We enjoy both sin and comfort too much to value all of God’s gifts; we are indicted by our lacklustre enthusiasm for the things of God.
The gift I’d like to focus on is dissatisfaction. There is a spiritual gift of dissatisfaction. And in our comfortable, western, industrialised world we dearly need it.
There’s also something that looks like the spiritual gift of dissatisfaction but is actually the infernal curse of cynicism. I have this one in spades.
Let me flesh out what I mean: if we believe that our world is passing away, that it is in fact groaning in the birth pangs of a better world (Romans 8) then we should compare our lives, our churches, and our societies, with what we understand is coming.
If we believe that the old creation is gone and the new come in Christ’s resurrection (John 20-21), but that the kingdom—the new creation—is also not yet here; that we live in what theologians call realised eschatology and I call the Between, then we must expect to see partial fulfilments of what the world will be like after she is reborn in fire. And we must expect to not see total fulfilments of that pregnant promise.
There’s a sense in which a Christian’s life is orientated towards a future that we only see through a glass, darkly (1 Corinthians 13). Or it’s supposed to be, anyway.
We also desire to see our hearts, our churches, and our cultures, changed and shaped in the direction of the Kingdom here and now before we die. That’s a good desire, and we should expect to see some fulfilments as the Spirit acts on us. As always, God changes churches by changing people. Typically I think he also changes cultures by changing churches—in Leithart’s language “the heavenly city resurrects the cities of men.”
These are good desires. It is good to ask what God requires of us in order to do as we ask. I think there are two criteria for a move of God, one for us and one for him. The requirement that sits with us is found in the logic of baptism in the Spirit. In John 7 Jesus gives one requirement for us to be changed: thirst.
In other words, we must want it. Want requires a precondition: dissatisfaction.
Read More
Related Posts:

We can all have confidence that the Lord Jesus has faithfully pioneered the perfect pathway through the wilderness in our place, and now He walks through the desert alongside us, reminding us of the Lord’s faithfulness and His forgetfulness. When necessary, He picks us up and carries us in His arms as the Good Shepherd, bringing us to the heavenly inheritance toward which the promised land pointed Israel.

1. The Book of Numbers is not a book simply about numbers.
The Hebrew title of the book is “In the Wilderness,” which is a much more descriptive and engaging title. The book charts Israel’s experience from the time they left Mount Sinai after their exodus from Egypt until they arrived at the brink of the promised land. It should only have taken Israel a few weeks to cover the distance from Sinai to Canaan. The problem was that they sent twelve spies to check out the land, and the majority came back with a negative report: the inhabitants of the land were too big and their cities too well-defended. There was no chance of victory (Num. 13–14). Joshua and Caleb told a different story, arguing that if God fought for Israel, they could certainly take the land, but their minority report was voted down. As a result, the Lord condemned the people to wander in the wilderness for the next forty years, until all the adults had died. Only then would they be able to enter the land and receive what He had promised.
2. The most important number in the Book of Numbers is two.
There are quite a lot of numbers in the book of Numbers, as well as long lists of people in two separate censuses (Num. 1; 26). It can be easy to get lost in the lists of names and numbers, which seem as obscure as sports statistics to a non-sports fan or the business listings to a non-accountant. They all have their part to play in telling the story of Israel’s wilderness years, however.
The most important number in the entire book is two—as in, two generations. The book of Numbers is about an unbelieving generation that failed to trust God and paid the price of a lifetime of wandering in the wilderness, followed by a new generation that stood on the brink of entering the land. Would the new generation be like their parents and give in once again to unbelief? Or would they chart a new course of faith in the Lord and receive the land that God had promised the patriarchs? The signs were good, with some initial victories over the Canaanites (e.g., Num. 21), but the jury was still out. That enables the stories in this book to challenge us as well: to which generation do we belong—the people of unbelief, whose bodies were scattered in the desert, or the people of faith, who would press forward to inherit the land (see Heb. 3:7–19)?
Read More
Related Posts: