There may not be a more salient, newsworthy intersection of religion, culture and politics than sexuality and sexual behavior.
Religion-beat professionals know that this creates news — in religious traditions that are shrinking, as well as those that are stable or growing.
This brings us to politics. If one considers some of the major fights surrounding the so-called Culture Wars — abortion, pornography, same-sex marriage — they are all related, in one way or the other, to clashes between traditional forms of religion and the Sexual Revolution.
Yet, the data surrounding these types of issues all point in the same direction — the American public is liberalizing at an incredible rate.
The bottom line: It’s hard to find an issue area in which the average adult in the United States holds a view that is to the right of the average American even 10 years ago.
For instance, consider how this first graph demonstrates how public opinion has shifted on same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization since 2004.
Note a pattern? Views of every religious group have moved in a more libertarian direction.
For example, less than 20% of evangelicals favored same-sex marriage in 2004. Now, it’s slightly less than 50%. In fact, evangelicals are the only religious tradition where a majority of respondents opposed same-sex marriage. It’s almost become an afterthought in the Culture War.
See the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrined same-sex marriage into federal law passed across party lines.
But that’s not the only area in which views of sexuality have shifted.
What about a married individual having sex with someone who is not their spouse? This graph breaks that question down into five-year birth cohorts and tracks responses over nearly five decades. There’s evidence here that even among Americans born in the late 1940s trends are moving toward a more permissive sexual ethic.
For people born in the 1970s, the share believing that extramarital sex is always wrong has dropped at least 15 percentage points in just the last 15 years. And among the youngest adults — the decline is even more precipitous. For those born in the late 1980s, nearly 85% believed that extramarital sex is always wrong. That was when that group was in their early twenties. Now, just half hold the same view.
There’s also a question in the General Social Survey about sex before marriage.
Again — there’s one clear and unmistakable conclusion: people are more permissive of sexual behavior outside the bounds of marriage now than in any prior decade.
This shift in overall opinion cannot be blamed on simple generational replacement, either. Instead, every birth cohort is less likely to say that premarital sex is “not wrong at all” today than 10 or 20 years ago.
This is staggering to consider, but there’s no birth cohort in 2021 in which less than 50% of respondents said that sex before marriage was “not wrong at all.” Clearly, the traditional Christian view of sexuality and sexual behavior has fallen by the wayside, as a majority stance in this culture.
This last graph takes an even wider view of Culture War issues — and the results are more of the same.
The general public has become less likely to say that extramarital sex is always wrong, less willing to make porn illegal, more likely to support legalizing marijuana, more likely to favor abortion for any reason and more supportive of same-sex marriage.
This puts religious leaders who contend for ancient, traditional teachings on issues of moral theology in a serious bind. They can keep pounding the pulpit on these issues in the hopes of trying to charge hearts and minds, while risking the alienation of many younger believers. Or, they can be silent on these issues and let the culture dictate people’s views. It is also crucial to keep an eye on which religious groups are growing and which are in sharp decline.
Do the math. Neither path leads to clear success or certain failure.
FIRST IMAGE: Image with a feature — “The speech of the serpent” — on the Times of Israel website.
FEATURED IMAGE: Sexual Revolution t-shirt for sale at REDBUBBLE.