C.S. Lewis wrote in 1952 that “perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful.” 

The good Oxford don did not live to see the times we now live in, times in which progressive extremists can state a straight face that actually there are no sexual perversions – times in which even the long-held taboos against pedophilia and incest are falling like dominoes. 

The evidence that in the name of absolute sexual freedom, traditional taboos are no longer to be honored is everywhere.  While sexual perversion has always existed, it has never been as widely tolerated and even promoted as it is today.

Examples abound – too many to cite.

But there is the case of the teenage girl who has decided to marry her dad and move to New Jersey, where incest, she stated, is legal. 

Then there is the recent exposure of a sex ring devoted to procurement of underage girls for the enjoyment of the world’s richest and most powerful – yet another example of the complete wreckage of sexual ethics.  Luminaries such as Bill Clinton and England’s Prince Andrew are among those accused of secretly cavorting with teenage girls procured by billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.  

The above is to say nothing of Hollywood’s elite’s sick interest in promoting and practicing pedophilia – or the recent scandal in Rotherham, England involving the farming out of underage children for sex to mostly Pakistani Muslims.  Authorities turned a blind eye for fear of being considered “racist.”

Nor did the popular author live to see the day in which elite priests of leftist orthodoxy proclaim that not only is there no unacceptable expression of the sex drive, but there also are no definitive categories of gender.  There is, the far left proclaims, no such thing as “he” or “she.”  Sexual identity and behavior are infinitely malleable and are defined by individual preference, not by moral or physical realities.  You may look like a man but prefer to be a woman.  By self-proclaimed fiat, you can become a woman.  

Lewis also did not see the times in which Christians who proclaim the sexual instinct can and does go wrong would be guilty of “hate” speech, considered worthy of thought reform, and have their businesses targeted for destruction because they hold orthodox Christian beliefs about sexual behavior, marriage, and human identity. 

In sum, Lewis did not live to see the day in which complete insanity about human sexuality became accepted leftist doctrine.

But insanity is always the outcome when any given aspect of human behavior or human identity is given absolute freedom of expression.  Insanity results, because any “freedom” without acknowledgment of boundaries or limits results in self-destruction accompanied by social chaos.  Social anarchy is the inevitable result of the denial of and assault against reality.  Once the ground of being – that is, how things are in reality – is denied or perverted, absolute freedom to follow every impulse, sexual or otherwise, seems possible.  But personal and social destruction is the consequence of such unbridled “freedom.”

To give him posthumous credit, Lewis was doubtless well aware of the trends that pointed to the destruction of Christian mores that insisted there is such a thing as sin – such a quaint concept. 

Lewis’s contemporary Aldous Huxley was prescient, seeing the trend toward the destruction of Christian mores concerning family and sexual behavior very clearly in his dystopian novel Brave New World, published in 1933.  Huxley predicted a future in which the words “mother” and “father” were expressions as odious as the “N”-word is in America today.  He predicted a time in which “Every one belongs to everyone else.”

As one of Huxley’s characters says to the as the yet supposedly uncivilized Savage:

‘But fathers and mothers!’ He shook his head. ‘You can't expect me to keep a straight face about fathers and mothers. And who's going to get excited about a boy having a girl or not having her?’ (The Savage winced; but Helmholtz, who was staring pensively at the floor, saw nothing.) ‘No.’ he concluded, with a sigh, ‘it won't do. We need some other kind of madness and violence. But what? What? Where can one find it?’ He was silent; then, shaking his head, ‘I don't know,’ he said at last, ‘I don't know.’

Huxley’s kerflummoxed character may not have been able to identify the madness and violence lurking within his own society, but for the West, madness and violence have arrived in the form of leftist ideology, including its advocacy of sexual and societal anarchy. 

As Winston Churchill noted, "[m]adness, once unleashed, knows no bounds."  The left, which acknowledges no bounds, but only “progress,”  has, quite simply, gone mad; and so have the institutions it now dominates, be they academia, the media, or liberal churches. 

It is ironic that Lewis’s Mere Christianity, one of the most iconic Christian books of the modern era, was published at about the same time as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.  Ginsberg’s poem, written in 1955, was a paean to sexual and societal anarchy.  It stood in stark contrast to Lewis’ Christian theology. 

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” Ginsberg wrote.

For Ginsberg, the best minds belonged to people like him, not to those who were at the time considered brilliant contributors to American society, including theologians such as Thomas Merton and others.  No, the best minds belonged to those who were drug addicts, anarchists, and, of course, poets like Ginsberg, who were committed to the destruction of the status quo – the “Machine.”  Absolute sexual freedom was part of the new freedom.

He wrote of the best minds he knew:

…who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in police cars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may…

And so forth.

And so on.

Ginsberg’s poem is virtually a hymn to the modern sexual movement, which sees “no crime” in any sexual proclivity.  His work is now virtually a liturgical requirement in America’s institutions of learning, a staple in any given literature course. 

However, you will not find Lewis’s classic required reading in those institutions.  It’s just too hateful, too dogmatic and constraining, based as it is on the superstition that God might actually have something to say about human behavior, including sexual behavior.

It is Ginsberg’s vision of sex and society that has become de rigueur in the West.  Ginsberg’s anarchical philosophy is longer confined to smoky dens, but is now accepted orthodoxy among those of the far left.

As it has been for some time, the West has been poised between two visions of what it means to be man and woman within society.

Will it be Ginsberg’s paean to decriminalization of all sexual behavior and the destruction of societal boundaries, or will it be the promotion of the Christian ideal of sexual fidelity characterized by boundaries once recognized as legitimate and as reflective of the reality of two distinct sexes created by God?

The restoration of sanity requires a revival of a Christian theology concerning sex and identity.  Without that, the Ginsberg vision of complete sexual “freedom” and consequent social anarchy will continue to prevail.

Will the Christian Church step up to recover its two-thousand-year-old commitment to Christ’s view of man and woman, sexuality and marriage?

It remains to be seen.

Fay Voshell holds a M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, where she was awarded the Charles Hodge prize for excellence in systematic theology.  Her articles have appeared in RealClearReligion, National Review, American Thinker, and many other online magazines.  She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com.