Screwtape knew his business. C.S. Lewis’ fictional devil knew a multitude of ways to ensnare and immiserate people, and poisoning relations between men and women was an essential weapon in his diabolic arsenal. As he put it to his protégé Wormwood, “The aim is to guide each sex away from those members of the other with whom spiritually helpful, happy, and fertile marriages are most likely.” He wanted men and women to be looking for the wrong person and also to be the wrong person.
Were he around, the wily old devil would undoubtedly gloat over current relations between men and women, which are in many ways worse even than he anticipated. There are, of course, still unhappy marriages, but whereas Screwtape took marriage as a cultural given, about half of American adults are now unmarried. The decline in marriage and childbearing has alarmed everyone from politicians to cultural commentators to Elon Musk, but observing the problem isn’t enough to fix it — people will not get married and have children just because it will be good for GDP in a few decades.
And though some people deliberately reject marriage and children, many men and women would like to get married and have kids but are struggling to pair off. Our culture does not teach men and women how to find, let alone how to be, good husbands and wives. Rather, it sometimes seems that, as Lutheran pastor Hans Fiene put it, “[O]ur culture teaches young men to be losers and young women to be narcissists.” Harsh, but perhaps fair.
Because men and women are different, the current cultural and relational wasteland will play out differently for each, often in ways that make men and women even less suited for each other, thereby establishing a relational doom loop in which cultural corruption encourages individual dysfunction that damages and destroys relationships — thereby further entrenching both the cultural and individual problems.
Pornography is an obvious example. It may be especially appealing to men who have not, as a nature documentary might put it, been able to find a mate, but it encourages habits that make it harder for them to establish and sustain a relationship with a woman. For example, porn has taught a generation of young men to be aroused by degrading and dangerous kinks, such as sexual strangulation. The result is further alienation and enmity between the sexes.
Sexual liberation has created many vicious cycles of this sort. A culture of promiscuity makes it more difficult to establish and maintain stable romantic relationships, and this then further entrenches a culture of promiscuity as people settle for hookups or open-ended relationships without commitment. This has decreased overall sexual satisfaction because people are most likely to have regular, pleasurable sex in committed relationships. Men may fantasize about bedding a new woman each night, but the truth is that very few have the status, wealth, or charisma to actually do so. For most of us, monogamous marriage is the best sexual deal we are going to get.
Another related vicious cycle is that of abortion. The sexual revolution required abortion to get rid of human beings whose conception is unwelcome, and this violent rejection of parental responsibility is self-perpetuating. By eliminating the reproductive consequences of sex, abortion encourages more casual sex, which then leads to more abortions. Thus, even though the sexual revolution has resulted in less sex overall, it has led to more sex in circumstances where a pregnancy will likely end in abortion. And as the fundamental solidarity of mother, father, and child is replaced with a selfish clash of competing interests, hearts are hardened as the most dependent humans are met with violence, rather than love.
As the evils and broken promises of the sexual revolution become ever more apparent, the signs and symptoms of our culture’s relational discontent are all around us, along with hints of renewal. But changing our culture will require not only a deliberate break with the sexual revolution but also a cultural rebuilding that reestablishes solidarity and cooperation between men and women.
The old guides and habits for bringing men and women together — and keeping them together in reasonable harmony — are largely gone. Even the people who retain elements of these lifeways (often as part of traditional religious beliefs and communities) are consciously countercultural about it. Renewal will need to be deliberate and intentional even though it will also be locally led.
Restoring right relations between men and women cannot be accomplished through a top-down scheme, even if there were someone with the power to try to implement one. However, it will rely on the deliberate efforts and guidance of local leaders and institutions. This can be generalized as a need for community, but it is churches in particular that can provide this.
Evangelizing in our broken culture means teaching people how to live and love, not just in the hope of heaven but also in the here and now. Most of us are called to the vocations of marriage and parenting, and churches can provide discipleship and discipline in a world that is losing its ability to bring men and women together into enduring, loving relationships. For instance, spaces must be established not only where men and women can meet but also where they can have recommendations to rely on and reputations to uphold. Churches can do that and much more.
Furthermore, because strong families are the basis for strong communities, the increasing estrangement of the sexes in our culture hurts everyone, so establishing and sustaining families will help everyone. Strong families can, for example, ensure the mixing of generations — even for those who are otherwise alone — by inviting people into homes and lives. Many single adults also live far from their families, and churches replete with strong marriages and families can offer them fellowship and participation in family life.
And, of course, strong families are the real solution to a multitude of social evils, from crime to education to poverty. Men and women getting and staying married and raising their children together are far more effective at ameliorating these evils than any government program.
The complementary union of men and women in marriage is the basis of civilization, not only in the obvious sense of providing for its continuation but also because it unites the two halves of the human race in solidarity and love. In this, we fulfill the vocations of marriage and parenthood that most of us are called to and in which we find deep joy.
We were made for this; fulfilling our vocations in accordance with natural law is better than whatever the Screwtapes of our day dangle in front of us. Christians must model and proclaim this in a culture that has lost the truth about how to live well in this life, let alone how to have hope for the next.
Loving our neighbors means protecting and promoting a right understanding of marriage, both in culture and policy. The truths of marriage and family are not idiosyncratic Christian observances but are universal in application, rooted in human nature, and directed toward our good and the good of those around us.
Nathanael Blake is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a fellow in the Life and Family Initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.
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