Sex & the American Experience by Allan Carlson

Sex & the American Experience

Facts versus Stereotypes About Love & Marriage in the Land of the Free

The following is an address delivered by Dr. Carlson at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 19, 2013, under the sponsorship of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

One of the assumptions of the contemporary liberal mind is that the history of Anglo-American morals has moved mainly in a linear direction: from repression to liberty. As one author of this mindset explains, the sixteenth-century English "were known throughout Europe for approaching the whole subject of sex with their well-known capacity for enduring hardship." But within Elizabethan England, the writer continues, there was a group that found even British sexual decorum "repulsive and disgusting." These Puritans "grew angrier and angrier until finally they could no longer tolerate the degenerate carrying-ons of their countrymen," and so they set sail in 1620 on the Mayflower for America.

Meanwhile, down in Colonial Virginia, the liberal story goes, the similarly twisted creators of the new Jamestown legal code declared that "No man shall commit the horrible, and detestable sins of Sodomie upon pain of death; & he or she that can be lawfully convict[ed] of Adultery shall be punished with death…and he or she, that shall commit fornication . . . for their first fault shall be whipt. . . ." The next 400 years, this contemporary liberal reports, would see a struggle to free Americans from the iron grip of Puritanism and the loathsome legal suppression of sexual joy.

Now I agree with contemporary historians of sex—a relatively new specialty in my discipline—that the story of sexuality in the American experience is vitally important and has been poorly told. I agree as well that sexuality has revolutionary potential . . . for the good. And I also agree that we Americans have been, in our better decades and eras, a sexually boisterous lot. But on other important matters, I profoundly differ.

To begin with, I view sexuality as a natural, powerful, and wonderful human impulse, but one that does require conscious channeling into culturally constructive and emotionally fulfilling paths. Vernard Eller said it well in a 1970 essay for The Christian Century:

Sex is like fire. Harnessed, disciplined, bent to human ends . . . sex is indeed a very great good, capable of serving even greater goods than the present generation has dreamed possible. However, if allowed simply to run wild, sex can be a forest fire, a most destructive—and an anti revolutionary—force.

I also underscore the profound discontinuity of sexual behavior in the American past. Careful study does not show a steady evolution from early repression toward greater freedom or license. Rather, the historical record shows an ebb and flow between periods when religious belief guided and shaped sexuality toward culture-building ends and periods when this religious influence weakened, and sexuality grew troubled or even culturally destructive. I will tell this story through six episodes from the American past.

First Episode: Puritan Marriage

Without question, Puritan New England in the seventeenth century exhibited a culture where, in two historians' words, "strong viable churches existed to buttress the authority of the family and to help supervise the rearing of children and youths." Puritan society also clearly rested on the moral indoctrination of these young through devices such as special catechisms, private religious societies, and covenant renewals, where groups of the young came together on the Sabbath to reaffirm the Christian covenants made by their parents.

And yet, these Puritans were also a surprisingly frisky and sensual bunch. A fine, and still largely unchallenged, source here is Edmund Morgan's classic study from 1944, The Puritan Family.


Allan C. Carlson is the John Howard Distinguished Senior Fellow at the International Organization for the Family. His most recent book is Family Cycles: Strength, Decline & Renewal in American Domestic Life, 1630-2000 (Transaction, 2016). He and his wife have four grown children and nine grandchildren. A "cradle Lutheran," he worships in a congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. He is a senior editor for Touchstone.

• Not a subscriber or wish to renew your subscription? Subscribe to Touchstone today for full online access. Over 30 years of publishing!


personal subscriptions

Purchase Print &
Online Subscription

Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!


RENEW your print/online
subscription

Purchase
Online Subscription

Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives including pdf downloads for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!


RENEW your online subscription

gift subscriptions

GIVE Print &
Online Subscription

Give six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for the reduced rate of $29.95. That's only $2.50 per month!


RENEW your gift subscription

Transactions will be processed on a secure server.

bulk subscriptions

Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.

kindle subscription

OR get a subscription to Touchstone to read on your Kindle for only $1.99 per month! (This option is KINDLE ONLY and does not include either print or online.)

Your subscription goes a long way to ensure that Touchstone is able to continue its mission of publishing quality Christian articles and commentary.


more on sex from the online archives

31.6—November/December 2018

Of Single Importance

on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner

28.3—May/June 2015

Of Bicycles, Sex, & Natural Law

Describing Human Ends & Our Limitations Is Neither Futile Nor Unloving by R. V. Young

27.6—Nov/Dec 2014

Tales of Forbidden Stereotypes

Real-Life Men & Women & the Tragic Loss of Human Comedy by Anthony Esolen


more from the online archives

31.5—September/October 2018

Pastoral Realism

on the Congregation as a Wilderness by Paul Gregory Alms

22.2—March 2009

The Good Father

on the Manly Character of St. Joseph by Joseph R. Fornieri

31.6—November/December 2018

Alias Santa Claus

on Childhood Encounters with a Christmas Icon by Rebecca Sicree

calling all readers

Please Donate

"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand

"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor

Support Touchstone

00