In
the United States, the 1960s marked the beginning of a breakdown in sexual
mores and a rise in family disruption, joined with a culture of dissent as many
tried to rationalize deviations from traditional morality. The United States
witnessed a massive social experiment linked to genuine progress for which the
Church was not prepared — discrimination against African-Americans and women
was coming to an end, and Catholics were ever-increasingly undergoing assimilation
into contemporary culture. As a result, Catholics began placing their spiritual
lives in one compartment and their daily activities in the secular arena in
another, commencing to treat their Catholic faith as an entirely private
matter, open to a “pick-and-choose” approach to doctrine. Many theologians, religious
educators and clergy succumbed to the same temptations. So it was hard for the
doctrinal teaching of Vatican II to be heard; what did get through was often
not the true council, but a “spirit” of Vatican II, of which I have discussed
at length in my book, The Smoke of Satan in the Temple of God.
How
did the Church fare in the Sixties in Britain? There has been an interest in
this decade recently as we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles’
arrival here in 1964, and so I became enchanted by an essay written last year by
former atheist A N Wilson in The Mail. Here are some reflections:
I’ve lived through the
greatest revolution in sexual mores in our history. The damage it’s done appalls
me.
By A. N. Wilson
….the 1960s were a
turning-point, and the decade did undoubtedly herald the Sexual
Revolution.
I was born in 1950…. And
far from being ‘rather late for me’, the revolutionary doctrines of the Sixties
were all readily adopted by me and countless others.
The arrival of a
contraceptive pill for women in 1961 appeared to signal the beginning of
guilt-free, pregnancy-free sex.….
But if the propagators
of the Sexual Revolution had been able to fast-forward 50 years, what would
they have expected to see? Surely not the shocking statistics about today’s
sexual habits in the UK which are available for all to study.
In 2011, there were
189,931 abortions carried out, a small rise on the previous year, and about
seven per cent more than a decade ago.
Ninety-six per cent of
these abortions were funded by the NHS, i.e. by you and me, the taxpayer. One
per cent of these were performed because the would-be parents feared the child
would be born handicapped in some way. Forty-seven per cent were so-called
medical abortions, carried out because the health of mother and child were at
risk.
The term ‘medical
abortion’ is very widely applied and covers the psychological ‘health’ of the
patient.
But even if you concede
that a little less than half the abortions had some medical justification, this
still tells us that more than 90,000 foetuses are aborted every year in this
country simply as a means of lazy ‘birth control’. Ninety thousand human lives
are thrown away because their births are considered too expensive or in some
other way inconvenient.
The Pill, far from
reducing the numbers of unwanted pregnancies, actually led to more.
When women neglected to
take the Pill, there seemed all the more reason to use abortion as a form of
birth control.
Despite the fact that,
in the wake of the Aids crisis, people were urged to use condoms and to indulge
in safe-sex, the message did not appear to get through.
In the past few years,
sexually transmitted diseases among young people have hugely increased, with more
and more young people contracting chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis and other
diseases, many of them unaware they were infected until after they had been
sexually active with a number of partners.
The divorce statistics
tell another miserable story. About one third of marriages in Britain end in
divorce. And because many couples do not marry at all before splitting up, the
number of broken homes is even greater.
This time of year is
when the painfulness of family break-up is felt most acutely. January 3 has
been nicknamed ‘divorce day’ by lawyers. In a moving article in the Mail
recently, Lowri Turner, a twice-divorced mother of three children, wrote about
the pain of waking up on Christmas morning without her children. She looks at
the presents under the tree, with no children to open them, and thinks: ‘This
isn’t the way things are supposed to be.’
Every parent who has
been through the often self-inflicted hell of divorce will know what she means.
So will the thousands of
children this Christmas who spent the day with only one parent — and often with
that parent’s new ‘partner’ whom they hate.
I hold up my hands. I
have been divorced. Although I was labelled a Young Fogey in my youth, I
imbibed all the liberationist sexual mores of the Sixties as far as sexual
morality was concerned.
I made myself and dozens
of people extremely unhappy — including, of course, my children and other
people’s children. I am absolutely certain that my parents, by contrast, who
married in 1939 and stayed together for more than 40 years until my father
died, never strayed from the marriage bed.
There were long periods
when they found marriage extremely tough, but having lived through years of
aching irritation and frustration, they grew to be Darby and Joan, deeply
dependent upon one another in old age, and in an imperfect but recognisable
way, an object lesson in the meaning of the word ‘love’.
Back in the Fifties, GfK
National Opinon Poll conducted a survey asking how happy people felt on a
sliding scale — from very happy to very unhappy.
In 1957, 52 per cent
said they were ‘very happy’. By 2005, the same set of questions found only 36
per cent were ‘very happy’, and the figures are falling.
More than half of those
questioned in the GfK’s most recent survey said that it was a stable
relationship which made them happy. Half those who were married said they were
‘very happy’, compared with only a quarter of singles.
The truth is that the
Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not
alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we
are as human beings.
It made nearly everyone
feel that they were free, or free-er, than their parents had been — free to
smoke pot, free to sleep around, free to pursue the passing dream of what felt,
at the time, like overwhelming love — an emotion which very seldom lasts, and a
word which is meaningless unless its definition includes commitment.
How easy it was to
dismiss old-fashioned sexual morality as ‘suburban’, as a prison for the human
soul. How easy it was to laugh at the ‘prudes’ who questioned the wisdom of
what was happening in the Sexual Revolution.
Yet, as the opinion poll shows, most of us feel
at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a
succession of lovers.
In fact, it is having a long-lasting, stable
relationship, having children, and maintaining, if possible, lifelong marriage.
[emphasis mine]
An amusing Victorian
historian, John Seeley, said the British Empire had been acquired in ‘a fit of
absence of mind’. He meant that no one sat down and planned for the British to
take over large parts of Asia and Africa: it was more a case of one thing leading
to another. In many ways, the Sexual Revolution of the Sixties and Seventies in
Britain was a bit like this.
People became more
prosperous. People were living longer. The old-fashioned concept of staying in
the same marriage and the same job all your life suddenly seemed so, so
boring.
But in the Forties and
Fifties, divorce had not been an option for most people because it was so very
expensive, in terms of economic as well as emotional cost. So people slogged
through their unhappy phases and came out at the other end.
It is easy to see, then,
if the tempting option of escaping a boring marriage was presented, that so
many people were prone to take the adventurous chance of a new partner, a new
way of life.
But the Sexual
Revolution was not, of course, all accidental. Not a bit of it. Many of the
most influential opinion-formers of the age were doing their best to undermine
all traditional morality, and especially the traditional morality of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition, which has always taught that marriage is for life….
The wackier clerics of
the Church of England, the pundits of the BBC, the groovier representatives of
the educational establishment, the liberal Press, have all, since the Sexual
Revolution began, gone along with the notion that a relaxation of sexual
morality will lead to a more enlightened and happy society.
This was despite the
fact that all the evidence around us demonstrates that the exact opposite is
the case.
In the Fifties, the era
when people were supposedly ‘repressed’, we were actually much happier than we
have been more recently — in an era when confused young people have been
invited to make up their own sexual morals as they went along.
The old American cliche
is that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube; and it is usually a
metaphor used to suggest that it is impossible to turn the clock back in
matters of public behaviour and morality. Actually, you know, I think that is
wrong.
Our generation, who
started to grow up ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first
LP’ got it all so horribly wrong….
We ignored the obvious
fact that moral conventions develop in human societies for a reason.
We may have thought it
was ‘hypocritical’ to condemn any form of sexual behaviour, and we may have
dismissed the undoubted happiness felt by married people as stuffy, repressed
and old hat.
But we were wrong,
wrong, wrong.
Two generations have
grown up — comprising children of selfish grown-ups who put their own momentary
emotional needs and impulses before family stability and the needs of their
children.
However, I don’t think
this behaviour can last much longer. The price we all pay for the fragmentation
of society, caused by the break-up of so many homes, will surely lead to a
massive rethink.
At least, let’s hope so.
