- NATIONAL CATHOLIC REGISTER - Sue Ellen Browder - BOOKS - APRIL 22, 2023 -
Nothing has caused more confusion and chaos in contemporary times than the sexual revolution. In her series of essays, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, Mary Eberstadt seeks to orient us in the midst of the chaos around us.
ADAM AND EVE AFTER THE PILL, REVISITED
By Mary Eberstadt
Ignatius Press, 2023
199 pages, $19.95
To order: ewtnrc.com
Seeing the sexual revolution not simply as an enemy of Christian values but a rival religion to Christianity, she makes a strong case for her argument that the sexual revolution has led not to liberation and freedom, but to catastrophe — and it has even infiltrated the Catholic Church.
Yet she writes, “To throw up one’s hands before the world is a dodge — especially for Catholics, especially now, in a moment when many are tempted for more reasons than one to do just that. Believers are called to read the signs of the times, not to whine about them.”
Citing many social-science studies to support her claims, Eberstadt documents the reality that the sexual revolution has gone hand-in-hand with: the breakdown of relationships between men and women, the collapse of the family, violent rage among the fatherless, the transgender movement, the “new intolerance” (or what has been called “cancel culture”), a loss of church attendance, and many divisive battles over sexuality even within the Church herself.
Describing sexual revolution as an integrated socio-political-religious movement that has abandoned God, Eberstadt suggests that if Christians allow ourselves to be intimidated and silenced by this atheistic worldview in an attempt to be “nice,” the revolution’s false ideology will continue to spread, wreaking havoc in the lives of the most vulnerable among us, including unborn babies.
Likening Eberstadt’s perceptions to those of George Weigel, Father Raymond de Souza, Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher, the late Cardinal George Pell (who wrote the book’s foreword), states, “In addition to family chaos, psychic chaos, anthropological chaos, and intellectual chaos, she finds her final example of contemporary chaos in the Catholic Church in the Western world, among those who want to transform Catholic teaching and are often hostile toward those who hold and teach the tradition.”
Pointing out the suffering and all-too-often misdiagnosed wounds the sexual revolution has inflicted, Eberstadt writes, “There is a common denominator beneath the bizarre rituals occurring on campuses and elsewhere, beneath an increasingly punitive social media, beneath the performance rage of BLM [Black Lives Matter] — indeed, beneath the cancel culture itself. It is anguish.”
Bringing the hidden premises of the sexual revolution’s secular faith to light (one of those premises being the need to destroy the family in order for men and women to be “free”), Eberstadt writes that “when people say they hope the Church changes its position on marriage or birth control, they are not talking about one religious faith — i.e., the Christian one. What they really mean is that they hope the church will suborn or replace its own theology with the new church of secularism.”