The Erotic Regime

At the heart of Cultural Marxism, the overarching elite vision of our time, is the Sexual Revolution, which currently is winning everywhere in the West.

Dear friends and supporters:

If adult time travelers from the 1950s visited today’s culture, the two most dramatic changes that would stupefy them are (1) the advance of technology and (2) the loosening of morals, the latter enhanced by the former. The 1960s have been touted the decade of the Sexual Revolution (SR), language actually invented by the German Cultural Marxist Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s and the very title of his book. Every leading departure from Christian and traditional sexual morality now engulfing the West was championed by Reich in 1936. All the devils are there.

What does the SR look like? Augusto Del Noce furnishes a sketch:

Total nudity must be unconditionally accepted and facilitated. Public intercourse must be allowed. Nobody can forbid his/her partner to have other lasting sexual relationships: a principle that today is called “for freedom of exchange between married couples”  and “complete liberty of group sex.” Nothing gives the right to criticize homosexual unions. Sexual education must be understood as the removal of all ancestral complexes that lead us to value absence, and so on.

Del Noce wrote this in 1970. Imagine what he would write today, as the SR advances relentlessly.

Sexual deviance has been around since the Fall, and the sexual antinomianism of earlier cultures like the ancient Roman Empire is almost legendary. What has changed in the last century is the enlistment of this widespread sexual liberation as the central feature of total revolution — the attempt to completely unravel the stable cultural fabric and reweave it with unprecedented antinomian threads.

The Alleged Impetus Behind the Sexual Revolution

You might be surprised to learn that the alleged impetus behind this intentional de-stabilization was anti-authoritarianism. Cultural Marxists like Reich believed that the German militarism that led to World War I and, later, the Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy was possible because of widespread repressed sexuality. When citizens aren’t free to engage in uninhibited sex, they redirect their sexual energy into personal and collective aggressiveness. This leads to war. 

The Cultural Marxists were committed to analyzing what they called “vitality” — the health and vigor of life. This human quality was closely associated with sexuality, and if it was repressed, it would be redirected in dangerous, militaristic, nationalistic ways. In short, supporting “free” sex could abolish war and the political oppression it required.

But underlying this sexual repressiveness (or so it was thought) was Christian culture, molded by the patriarchal family and marital-exclusive sexuality. The Cultural Marxists hated first creation, because of its inherent laws of male, female, family, and dominion, and, second, the Bible, because of its sexual strictures and penalties for violating them. Any culture privileging Christianity or the Bible stands as a bulwark against sexual revolution. Therefore, Christian culture must go.

Cultural (Sexual) Marxism versus Classical (Economic) Marxism

The Cultural Marxists became convinced that this was one area in which their Classically Marxists predecessors like Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin had failed. They had assumed that the fundamental facet of human life was economic. They were wrong; it is sexual. This is why the Cultural Marxists fused Freudianism with Marxism to help produce Western anti-economic (cultural) Marxism. 

Classical Marxism was convinced it could create the Good Society by destroying all economic hierarchies in leveling incomes. By contrast, the Cultural Marxists were convinced they could establish a secular utopia by destroying all sexual hierarchies by leveling all traditional (Christian) sexual ethics.

For the Classical Marxist, the economic revolution must be replaced by the SR. In the Soviet Union and Red China, the engine of revolution was the class struggle: the proletariat (employees, “wage slaves”) versus the bourgeoisie (the wealthy, the business owners).

The new revolutionary struggle

For the Cultural Marxist, the class struggle must be replaced by the sexual struggle: liberation from Christian sexual morality. The father must not be legally permitted to demand sexual fidelity of his family. Both the wife and the husband must be given legal and cultural freedom for an “open” marriage. Children must be trained at a very young age to experiment sexually. The younger they can throw off sexual oppressiveness, the more peaceful society will become. Porn must be not only a harmless diversion but a tool for sexual liberty. Abortion must become birth control’s backup plan (Mary Eberstadt).

The very first pages of Reich’s book identify traditional sexual morality as a disease that his Marxist sexological therapy can cure, one aspect of which is the sexualization of very young children. The earlier we can initiate children into sexuality, the better for them and society.

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Our broad thinking about life doesn’t just shape our view of human sexuality. Our view of human sexuality shapes the rest of our thinking. Western society’s sexual views and practices over the last few decades haven’t changed so dramatically only because the prominent worldview of our society has changed; our society has changed because its sexual worldview has changed.

This book is about why and how that change came about, how injurious it has been to our culture, and what Christians can do to reverse it. A distinctively Christian strategy for reversing the sexual revolution and its worldview is a restoration of a full-orbed, biblical faith in every aspect of thought and life.

Get the book here.

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A Pit Stop for the Revolution

Today, the legalization of same-sex “marriage” is only a pit stop on the great cultural speedway of SR. Next up the green flag will fly over bigamy, bestiality, and pedophilia. There is no logic whatsoever in drawing the race to a close after sexual liberation at adult homosexuality. All humans everywhere must be sexually liberated in toto. Those who consider this assertion mock-worthy speculation seem to have forgotten that as late as the early 70s, homosexuality was considered by secular psychologists a mental disorder. To suggest such an idea today would elicit banishment from almost any polite company. If there is no reversal, the same will be the case for legalized pedophilia in 2050 — or earlier.

The erotic offensive

The SR cannot be sustained apart from a cultural and political revolution. Both political laws and cultural mores must be imposed to guarantee the uninhibited sexuality that creates the good, just, free, and peaceful society. There must be an erotic regime, successful only to the extent that it embraces the erotic offensive: the unremitting attack on Christian sexual morality.

The way to neutralize the Christian Faith in society is not by prohibiting the gospel of Jesus Christ, which would provoke Christian pushback, but by prohibiting the church’s spread of sexual morality. If society can get rid of biblical sexual standards, it can get rid of biblical Christianity, because Christianity is based on creational norms. There’s no such thing as the gospel of Jesus Christ that is indifferent to something as basic to the world as its creational sexual norms. The Cross has meaning only in a world where God’s creational laws are recognized. Destroy creational norms, destroy the Christian Faith.

The erotic offensive began decades ago with the popularization of recreational contraception, moved forward to the acceptance of all consensual adult sex and porn, and pressed to the routinization of homosexuality. More recently, the Obergefell decision legally authorized what had been culturally authorized for the previous 25 years. The cultural revolution laid the ground for the legal revolution.

The United States as an Erotic Regime

Joe Biden declared in 2020 that if elected he would champion transgender rights, and he has swiftly moved to keep that promise. The edge of the SR is transgenderism, “gender affirmation surgery,” and the legal rights of males transformed into females to participate in women’s sports. Just as Classical Marxists in the Soviet Union perceived economic hierarchies to be the social evils that must be smashed, so the Cultural Marxists in the West today see sexual hierarchies as the great cultural depravity that must be purged from all society. There can be no just society unless “gender” is “fluid.”

In the fourth edition (1949) of his book The Sexual Revolution, Reich suggested that the United States was much more hospitable to this revolution than the Soviet Union. How could this be? In order to guarantee equalized incomes, the impulse to economic consumption must be held in check. So citizens must be content with very little disposable income, and this meant an inability to explore in its fullness uninhibited sexuality.

But the economic freedom of the United States, when cut off from Christian virtue by which alone it can survive and thrive over the long term, provides the economic means to live a life marinated in uninhibited sexuality.

Free markets and free sex

This is why many conservatives might find it odd that Cultural Marxists, while socialist, are not opposed to a wealthy middle class. They have made their peace with neo-liberalism, because they understand that a wealthy society willing to give up the Christian Faith as the source of its wealth can furnish the material wherewithal to create the erotic regime — “all sex all the time” (Theodore Dalrymple).

As Del Noce recognized, the irony is that as the West was vanquishing Classical Marxism in the 50’s-70s, it was surrendering to Cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism succeeded in Marxifying the American middle class where Classical Marxism had failed.

Conclusion

All of this is to say that that today’s libidinous society isn’t simply a natural, normal development of a society that sets God aside. It is that, of course.

But it is also, and more importantly, the coercive installation of a particular worldview — the erotic regime. To overturn sexual morality in a society – healthy, wholesome, joyous, monogamous sex between a married man and woman, producing children — is the erotic offensive designed to create an entirely different worldview: and world. It is not simply a world without biblical sexual standards, but a world with new secular standards replacing the old Christian ones. It is not simply that biblical sexuality is mocked as retrograde but permitted among repressed hidebound bumpkins. No. This biblical sexuality must be under assault everywhere. It must, in the end, be extirpated.

Why? Because to eliminate Christian sexuality is to eliminate the Christian society.

Church revivals, strategies for re-capturing the White House, and devotional book publishing are lambs for the slaughter before the much more voracious erotic offensive.

Nothing less than an entire worldview shift, the re-routinization of creational norms outlined in the Bible, will stop this revolution in its tracks.

For this reason, the cultural battles must be waged at a very deep worldview level.

Anything less drastic will simply be negotiating a gradual surrender to the erotic regime.

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Personal

I just returned from Pratt, Kansas, where I preached the funeral for our dear friend Melinda Enick, long-time wife of Pastor Doug Enick of Trinity Evangelical Church. You can watch the funeral here. You can hear my message “When Victory Swallows Up Death” here. It was a grief-filled but joy-tempered weekend.

Next week Sharon and I fly to Texas. On Valentine’s Day I’ll be preaching during morning worship at City Church, Corpus Christi. The following weekend, we’ll be in the Rio Grande Valley, where I’ll be speaking five times, including adult Sunday school and worship:

I pray that I’ll be able to see many of you in Corpus or McAllen.

Next week I plan to write here about the topics I’ll be addressing at the conference.

Your prayers and money keep CCL forging ahead in a time in which our thoughtful, uncompromising message is critically needed. Thank you profoundly.

Yours for the King,

Founder & President

Center for Cultural Leadership

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